The Blade Itself

by Joe Abercrombie

  ‘Besides, that was a different age. A violent age. Only in the Old Empire were people advanced beyond the primitive. Midderland, the heart of the Union, believe it or not, was a sty. A wasteland of warring, barbaric tribes. The luckiest among them were taken into the Maker’s service. The rest were painted-face savages, without writing, without science, with barely anything to separate them from the beasts.’

  Jezal glanced furtively up at Ninefingers. It was not at all difficult to picture a barbaric state with that big brute beside him, but it was ridiculous to suppose that his beautiful home had once been a wasteland, that he was descended from primitives. This bald old man was a blathering liar, or a madman, but some important people seemed to take him seriously.

  And Jezal thought it best always to do what the important people said.

  Logen followed the others into a broken-down courtyard, bounded on three sides by the crumbling buildings of the University, on the fourth by the inner face of the sheer wall of the Agriont. All was covered in old moss, thick ivy, dry brambles. A man sat on a rickety chair among the weeds, watching them come closer.

  ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ he said, pushing himself up with some difficulty. ‘Damn knees, I’m not what I used to be.’ An unremarkable man past middle-age, in a threadbare shirt with stains down the front.

  Bayaz frowned at him. ‘You are the Chief Warden?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘And where are the rest of your company?’

  ‘My wife is getting the breakfast ready, but not counting her, well, I am the whole company. It’s eggs,’ he said happily, patting his stomach.

  ‘What?’

  ‘For breakfast. I like eggs.’

  ‘Good for you,’ muttered Bayaz, looking slightly put out. ‘In King Casamir’s reign, the bravest fifty men of the King’s Own were appointed Wardens of the House, to guard this gate. There was considered to be no higher honour.’

  ‘That was a long time ago,’ said the one and only Warden, plucking at his dirty shirt. ‘There were nine of us when I was a lad, but they went on to other things, or died, and were never replaced. Don’t know who’ll take over when I’m gone. There haven’t been too many applicants.’

  ‘You surprise me.’ Bayaz cleared his throat. ‘Oh, Chief Warden! I, Bayaz, First of the Magi, seek your leave to pass up the stair to the fifth gate, beyond the fifth gate and onto the bridge, across the bridge and to the door of the Maker’s House.’

  The Chief Warden squinted back. ‘You sure?’

  Bayaz was growing impatient. ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘I remember the last fellow who tried it, way back when I was a lad. Some big man, I reckon, some thinker. He went up those steps with ten strong workmen, chisels and hammers and picks and what-have-you, telling us how he was going to open up the House, bring out its treasures and all. Five minutes and they were back, saying nothing, looking like they saw the dead walk.’

  ‘What happened?’ murmured Luthar.

  ‘Don’t know, but they had no treasures with them, I can tell you that.’

  ‘Without doubt a daunting story,’ said Bayaz, ‘but we’re going.’

  ‘Your business, I suppose.’ And the old man turned and slouched across the miserable courtyard. Up a narrow stair they went, the steps worn down in the middle, up to a tunnel through the high wall of the Agriont, on to a narrow gate in the darkness.

  Logen felt an odd sense of worry as the bolts slid back. He shrugged his shoulders, trying to get rid of it, and the Warden grinned at him. ‘You can feel it already, eh?’

  ‘Feel what?’

  ‘The Maker’s breath, they call it.’ He gave the doors the gentlest shove. They swung open together, light spilling through into the darkness. ‘The Maker’s breath.’

  Glokta tottered across the bridge, teeth clenched tight on gums, painfully aware of the volume of empty air beneath his feet. It was a single, delicate arch, leaping from high up on the wall of the Agriont to the gate of the Maker’s House. He had often admired it from down in the city, on the other side of the lake, wondering how it had stayed up all these years. A spectacular, remarkable, beautiful thing. It does not seem so beautiful now. Not much wider than a man lying down, too narrow by far for comfort, and with a terrifying drop to the water below. Worse still, it had no parapet. Not so much as a wooden handrail. And the breeze is rather fresh today.

  Luthar and Ninefingers seemed worried enough by it. And they have the free and painless use of both their legs. Only Bayaz made the long trip across without apparent worry, as confident as if his feet were on a country lane.

  They walked always in the vast shadow of the House of the Maker, of course. The closer they came, the more massive it seemed, its lowest parapet far higher than the wall of the Agriont. A stark black mountain, rising sheer from the lake below, blotting out the sun. A thing from a different age, built on a different scale.

  Glokta glanced back towards the gate behind him. Did he catch a glimpse of something between the battlements on the wall above? A Practical watching? They would see the old man fail to open the door. They would be waiting to take him on their way back through. But until then, I am helpless. It was not a comforting thought.

  And Glokta was in need of comfort. As he tottered further across the bridge, a niggling fear swelled inside him. It was more than the height, more than the strange company, more than the great tower looming above. A base fear, without reason. The animal terror of a nightmare. With every shuffling step the feeling grew. He could see the door now, a square of dark metal set back into the smooth stones of the tower. A circle of letters was etched into the centre of it. For some reason they made Glokta want to vomit, but he dragged himself closer. Two circles: large letters and small letters, a spidery script he did not recognise. His guts churned. Many circles: letters and lines, too detailed to take in. They swam before his stinging, weeping eyes. Glokta could go no further. He stood there, leaning on his cane, fighting with every ounce of will against the need to fall to his knees, turn and crawl away.

  Ninefingers was faring little better, breathing hard through his nose, a look of the most profound horror and disgust on his face. Luthar was in considerably worse shape: teeth gritted, white-faced and palsied. He dropped slowly down on one knee, gasping, as Glokta edged past him.

  Bayaz did not seem afraid. He stepped right up to the door and ran his fingers over the larger symbols. ‘Eleven wards, and eleven wards reversed.’ He traced the circle of smaller characters. ‘And eleven times eleven.’ His finger followed the fine line outside them. Can it be that line is made of tiny letters too? ‘Who can say how many hundreds here? Truly, a most potent enchantment!’

  The sense of awe was only slightly diminished by the sound of Luthar puking noisily over the side of the bridge. ‘What does it say?’ croaked Glokta, swallowing some bile of his own.

  The old man grinned at him. ‘Can you not feel it, Inquisitor? It says turn away. It says get you gone. It says . . . none . . . shall . . . pass. But the message is not for us.’ He reached into his collar and pulled out the rod of metal. The same dark metal as the door itself.

  ‘We shouldn’t be here,’ growled Ninefingers from behind. ‘This place is dead. We should go.’ But Bayaz did not seem to hear.

  ‘The magic has leaked out of the world,’ Glokta heard him murmuring, ‘and all the achievements of Juvens lie in ruins.’ He weighed the key in his hand, brought it slowly upwards. ‘But the Maker’s works stand strong as ever. Time has not diminished them . . . nor ever will.’ There did not even seem to be a hole, but the key slid slowly into the door. Slowly, slowly, into the very centre of the circles. Glokta held his breath.

  Click.

  And nothing happened. The door did not open. That is all then. The game is over. He felt a surge of relief as he turned back towards the Agriont, raising a hand to signal to the Practicals on the wall above. I need not go further. I need not. Then an answering echo came from deep within.

  Click.

 
Glokta felt his face twitch in sympathy with the sound. Did I imagine it? He hoped so, with all his being.

  Click.

  Again. No mistake. And now, before his disbelieving eyes, the circles in the door began to turn. Glokta took a stunned step back, his cane scraping on the stones of the bridge.

  Click, click.

  There had been no sign that the metal was not all one piece, no cracks, no grooves, no mechanism, and yet the circles span, each at a different speed.

  Click, click, click . . .

  Faster now, and faster. Glokta felt dizzy. The innermost ring, with the largest letters, was still crawling. The outermost, the thinnest one, was flying round too fast for his eyes to follow.

  . . . click, click, click, click, click . . .

  Shapes formed in the markings as the symbols passed each other: lines, squares, triangles, unimaginably intricate, dancing before his eyes then vanishing as the wheels spun on . . .

  Click.

  And the circles were still, arranged in a new pattern. Bayaz reached up and pulled the key from the door. There was a soft hissing, barely audible, as of water far away, and a long crack appeared in the door. The two halves moved slowly, smoothly away from each other. The space between them grew steadily larger.

  Click.

  They slid into the walls, flush with the sides of the square archway. The door stood open.

  ‘Now that,’ said Bayaz softly, ‘is craftsmanship.’

  No fetid wind spilled out, no stench of rot or decay, no sign of long years passed, only a waft of cool, dry air. And yet the feeling is of opening a coffin.

  Silence, but for the wind fumbling across the dark stones, the breath sighing in Glokta’s dry throat, the distant lapping of the water far below. The unearthly terror was gone. He felt only a deep worry as he stared into the open archway. But no worse than when I wait outside the Arch Lector’s office. Bayaz turned round, smiling.

  ‘Long years have passed since I sealed this place, and in all that slow time no man has crossed the threshold. You three are truly honoured.’ Glokta did not feel honoured. He felt ill. ‘There are dangers within. Touch nothing, and go only where I lead you. Follow close behind me, for the ways are not always the same.’

  ‘Not the same?’ asked Glokta. ‘How can that be?’

  The old man shrugged. ‘I am only the doorman,’ he said as he slipped the key and its chain back inside his shirt, ‘not the architect.’ And he stepped into the shadows.

  Jezal did not feel well, not well at all. It was not simply the vile nausea that the letters on the doors had somehow created, it was more. A lurch of sudden shock and disgust, like picking up a cup and drinking, expecting water, and finding something else inside. Piss perhaps, in this case. That same wave of ugly surprise, but stretching out over minutes, over hours. Things that he had dismissed as foolishness, or old stories, were suddenly revealed as facts before his eyes. The world was a different place than it had been the day before, a weird and unsettling place, and he had infinitely preferred it the way it was.

  He could not understand why he had to be here. Jezal knew precious little about history. Kanedias, Juvens, Bayaz even, they were names from dusty books, heard as a child and holding no interest even then. It was just bad luck, bad luck was all. He had won the Contest, and here he was, wandering about in some strange old tower. That was all it was. A strange old tower.

  ‘Welcome,’ said Bayaz, ‘to the House of the Maker.’

  Jezal looked up from the floor and his jaw sagged open. The word ‘house’ did little to describe the vastness of the dim space in which he found himself. The Lords’ Round itself could have fitted comfortably inside it, the entire building, with room to spare. The walls were made from rough stones, unfinished, unmortared, piled haphazardly, but rising endlessly upward, upward. Above the centre of the room, far above, something was suspended. A huge, fascinating something.

  It put Jezal in mind of a navigator’s instruments, rendered on an enormous scale. A system of gigantic metal rings, shining in the dim light, one about the other, with further, smaller rings running between them, inside them, around them. Hundreds of them perhaps, all told, scored with markings: writing maybe, or meaningless scratches. A large black ball hung in the centre.

  Bayaz was already walking out into the vast circle of the floor, covered in intricate lines, set into the dark stone in bright metal, his footfalls echoing high above. Jezal crept after him. There was something frightening, something dizzying, about moving across a space so huge.

  ‘This is Midderland,’ said Bayaz.

  ‘What?’

  The old man pointed down. The squiggly lines of metal began to take on meaning. Coastlines, mountains, rivers, the land and the sea. The shape of Midderland, clear in Jezal’s mind from a hundred maps, was laid out beneath his feet.

  ‘The whole Circle of the World.’ Bayaz gestured across the endless floor. ‘That way is Angland, and beyond, the North. Gurkhul is over there. There is Starikland, and the Old Empire, and over here the City States of Styria, beyond them Suljuk and distant Thond. Kanedias observed that the lands of the known World form a circle, with its centre here, at his House, and its outer edge passing through the island of Shabulyan, far to the west, beyond the Old Empire.’

  ‘The edge of the World,’ muttered the Northman, nodding slowly to himself.

  ‘Some arrogance,’ snorted Glokta, ‘to think of your home as the centre of everything.’

  ‘Huh.’ Bayaz looked about him at the vastness of the chamber. ‘The Maker was never short on arrogance. Nor were his brothers.’

  Jezal stared up gormlessly. The room was even higher than it was wide, its ceiling, if there was one, lost in shadow. An iron rail ran round the rough stone walls, a gallery perhaps twenty strides above. Beyond it, higher still, there was another, and another, and another, vague in the half light. Over all hung the strange device.

  He gave a sudden start. It was moving! It was all moving! Slowly, smoothly, silently, the rings shifted, turned, revolved one about the other. He could not imagine how it was driven. Somehow, the key turning in the lock must have set it off . . . or could it have been turning all these years?

  He felt dizzy. The whole mechanism now seemed to be spinning, revolving, faster and faster, the galleries too, shifting in opposite directions. Staring straight upwards was not helping with his sense of disorientation, and he fixed his aching eyes on the floor, on the map of Midderland beneath his feet. He gasped. That was even worse! Now the whole floor seemed to be turning! The entire chamber was revolving around him! The archways leading out were all identical, a dozen of them or more. He could not guess now through which one they had entered. He felt a wave of horrible panic. Only that distant black orb in the centre of the device was still. He fixed his watering eyes desperately on that, forced himself to breathe slow.

  The feeling faded. The vast hall was still again, almost. The rings were still shifting, almost imperceptibly, inching ever onwards. He swallowed a mouthful of spit, hunched his shoulders, and hurried after the others with his head down.

  ‘Not that way!’ roared Bayaz suddenly, his voice exploding in the thick silence, ripping out and bouncing back, echoing a thousand times around the cavernous space.

  ‘Not that way!’

  ‘Not that way!’

  Jezal jumped backwards. The archway, and the dim hall beyond, looked identical to the one down which the others had been walking, but he saw now that they were off to his right. He had got turned around somehow.

  ‘Go only where I go, I said!’ hissed the old man.

  ‘Not that way.’

  ‘Not that way.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ stammered Jezal, his voice sounding pitifully small in the vast space, ‘I thought . . . it all looks the same!’

  Bayaz placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder and drew him smoothly away. ‘I did not mean to scare you, my friend, but it would be a great shame if one so promising were taken from us quite so young.’ Jezal sw
allowed and stared into the shadowy hallway, wondering what might have awaited him down there. His mind provided any number of unpleasant possibilities.

  The echoes still whispered at him as he turned away. ‘. . . not that way, not that way, not that way . . .’

  Logen hated this place. The stones were cold and dead, the air was still and dead, even the sounds they made as they moved fell muffled and lifeless. It wasn’t cold and it wasn’t hot, and yet his back trickled with sweat, his neck prickled with aimless fear. He’d jerk around every few steps, stung by the sudden feeling he was being watched, but there was never anyone behind him. Only the boy Luthar and the cripple Glokta, looking every bit as worried and confused as he was.

  ‘We chased him through these very halls,’ murmured Bayaz quietly. ‘Eleven of us. All the Magi, together for the last time. All but Khalul. Zacharus, and Cawneil, they fought with the Maker here, and each was bested. They were fortunate to escape with their lives. Anselmi and Brokentooth had worse luck. Kanedias was the death of them. Two good friends, two brothers, I lost that day.’

  They edged round a narrow balcony, lit by a pale curtain of light. On one side sheer stones rose smooth, on the other they dropped away and were lost in the darkness. A black pit, full of shadows, with no far side, no top, no bottom. Despite the vastness of the space there were no echoes. No air moved. There was not the tiniest breeze. The air was stale and close as a tomb.

  ‘There should be water down there, surely,’ muttered Glokta, frowning over the rail. ‘There should be something, shouldn’t there?’ He squinted up. ‘Where’s the ceiling?’

  ‘This place stinks,’ whined Luthar, one hand clasped over his nose.

  Logen agreed with him, for once. It was a smell he knew well, and his lips curled back with hatred at it. ‘Smells like fucking Flatheads.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Bayaz, ‘the Shanka are the Maker’s work also.’