The Blade Itself

by Joe Abercrombie

  An awful mistake. Better to embrace the burning fire.

  Crack!

  The Bloody-Nine’s forehead smashed into his mouth. He felt the Stone-Splitter’s grip slacken a little and he wriggled his shoulders, making room, wriggling, wriggling, mole in his burrow. He swung his head back as far as it would go. Billy-goat charges. The second head-butt smashed the Stone-Splitter’s flat nose open. He grunted and the big arms released a little more. The third cracked his cheekbone. The arms fell away. The fourth broke his heavy jaw. Now it was the Bloody-Nine holding him up, smiling as he mashed his forehead into the shattered face. Woodpecker pecking, tap, tap, tap. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. There was a satisfying rhythm to the crunching of the face bones. Nine, and he let the Stone-Splitter fall. He sagged sideways and crumpled onto the floor, blood spilling from his ruined face.

  ‘How’s that for yer?’ laughed the Bloody-Nine, wiping blood out of his eyes and giving the Stone-Splitter’s lifeless body a couple of kicks. The room spun around him, swam around him, laughing, laughing. ‘How’s that . . . fuck . . .’ He stumbled, blinked, sleepy, campfire guttering. ‘No . . . not yet . . .’ He dropped to his knees. Not yet. There was more to do, always more.

  ‘Not yet,’ he snarled, but his time was up . . .

  . . . Logen screamed. He fell down. Pain, everywhere. His legs, his shoulder, his head. He wailed until the blood caught in his throat, then he coughed and gasped and rolled around, scrabbling at the floor. The world was a blurry smear. He gurgled up blood and drooled it out, long enough to start wailing again.

  A hand clamped over his mouth. ‘Stop your damn crying, pink! Now, you hear me?’ A voice, whispering urgent in his ear. Strange, hard voice. ‘Stop your crying or I leave you, understand? One chance!’ The hand came away. Air came out between his gritted teeth in a high pitched, keening moan, but not too loud.

  A hand clamped round his wrist, dragged his arm up. He gasped as his shoulder stretched out, was dragged over something hard. Torture. ‘Up, bastard, I can’t carry you! Up, now! One chance, understand?’

  He was lifted slowly, he tried to push with his legs. The breath whistled and clicked in his throat, but he could do it. Left foot, right foot. Easy. His knee buckled, pain stabbed up his leg. He screamed again and fell, grovelled on the floor. Best to lie still. His eyes closed.

  Something slapped him hard in the face, and again. He grunted. Something slid under his armpit, started to pull him up.

  ‘Up, pink! Up, or I leave you. One chance, you hear?’

  Breath in, breath out. Left foot, right foot.

  Longfoot fussed and worried, first tapping his fingers on the arm of his chair, then counting on them, shaking his head and moaning about tides. Jezal stayed silent, hoping against hope that the two savages might have drowned in the moat, and that the whole venture might therefore come to nothing. There would still be plenty of time to make it to Angland. Perhaps all was not lost . . .

  He heard the door open behind him, and his dreams were punctured. Misery swaddled him once again, but it was soon replaced by horrified surprise as he turned around.

  Two ragged shapes stood in the doorway, covered in blood and filth. Devils, surely, stepped out from some gate to hell. The Gurkish woman was cursing as she lurched into the room. Ninefingers had one arm across her shoulders, the other swinging loose, blood dripping from his fingertips, head drooping.

  They wobbled together for a step or two, then the Northman’s stumbling foot caught on a chair leg and they tumbled onto the floor. The woman snarled and shrugged off his limp arm, shoved him away and scrambled up to her feet. Ninefingers rolled over slowly, groaning, and a deep gash in his shoulder yawned open, oozing blood across the carpet. It was red in there, like fresh meat in a butcher’s shop. Jezal swallowed, horrified and fascinated at once.

  ‘God’s breath!’

  ‘They came for us.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who came?’

  A woman sidled cautiously around the door frame, red-haired, all in black, wearing a mask. A Practical, Jezal’s numb brain was saying, but he could not understand why she was so bruised, or walking with such a limp. Another edged through behind her, a man, armed with a heavy sword.

  ‘You’re coming with us,’ said the woman.

  ‘Make me!’ Maljinn spat at her. Jezal was shocked to see she had produced a knife from somewhere, and a bloody one at that. She should not be armed! Not here!

  He realised, stupidly, that he was wearing a sword. Of course he was. He fumbled with the hilt and drew it, with the vague intention of knocking the Gurkish devil on the back of the head with the flat before she could do any more damage. If the Inquisition wanted her they could damn well have her, and the rest of them too. Unfortunately, the Practicals got the wrong idea.

  ‘Drop it,’ hissed the red-haired woman, glaring at him through narrow eyes.

  ‘I will not!’ said Jezal, tremendously offended that she might think he was on the side of these villains.

  ‘Erm . . .’ said Quai.

  ‘Aaargh,’ groaned Ninefingers, clutching up a bloody handful of carpet and dragging it towards him, making the table lurch across the floor.

  A third Practical crept through the door, around the red-haired woman, a heavy mace in his gloved fist. An unpleasant-looking weapon. Jezal could not help picturing the effect it might have on his skull, if swung in anger. He fingered the hilt of his sword uncertainly, feeling in terrible need of someone to tell him what to do.

  ‘Coming with us,’ said the woman again, as her two friends advanced slowly into the room.

  ‘Oh dear,’ murmured Longfoot, taking cover behind the table.

  Then the door to the bathroom banged against the wall. Bayaz stood there, entirely naked, dripping with soapy water. His slow gaze took in first Ferro, scowling with her knife out, then Longfoot hiding behind the table, Jezal with sword drawn, Quai standing with his mouth open, Ninefingers sprawled out in a bloody ruin, and finally the three black masked figures, weapons at the ready.

  There was a pregnant pause.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ he roared, striding into the centre of the room, water dripping from his beard, down through the grizzled white hairs on his chest, off his slapping fruits. It was a strange sight to see. A naked old man confronting three armed Practicals of the Inquisition. Ridiculous, and yet no one was laughing. There was something strangely terrifying about him, even without his clothes and running with wet. It was the Practicals who shifted backwards, confused, scared even.

  ‘You’re coming with us,’ the woman repeated, though a certain doubt seemed to have entered her voice. One of her companions stepped warily toward Bayaz.

  Jezal felt a strange sensation in his stomach. A tugging, a sucking, an empty, sick feeling. It was like being back on the bridge, in the shadow of the Maker’s House. Only worse. The wizard’s face had turned terribly hard. ‘My patience is at an end.’

  Like a bottle dropped from a great height, the nearest Practical burst apart. There was no thunderclap, only a gentle squelching. One moment he was moving toward the old man, sword raised, entirely whole. The next he was a thousand fragments. Some unknown part of him thudded wetly against the plaster next to Jezal’s head. His sword dropped and rattled on the boards.

  ‘You were saying?’ growled the First of the Magi.

  Jezal’s knees trembled. His mouth gaped. He felt faint, and queasy, and awfully hollow inside. There were spots of blood across his face, but he dared not move to wipe them off. He stared at the naked old man, unable to believe his eyes. It seemed that he had watched a well-meaning old buffoon change in an instant into a brutal murderer, and without the slightest grain of hesitation.

  The red-haired woman stood there a moment, spattered with blood and flecks of meat and bone, eyes wide as two dinner plates, then started to shuffle slowly backwards towards the door. The other one followed her, almost tripping over Ninefingers’ foot in his haste to get away. Everyone else stayed motionless a
s statues. Jezal heard quick footsteps in the corridor outside as the two Practicals ran for their lives. He almost envied them. They, it seemed, would escape. He was trapped in this nightmare.

  ‘We must leave, now!’ barked Bayaz, wincing as if he was in pain, ‘just as soon as I have my trousers on. Help him, Longfoot!’ he shouted over his shoulder. For once, the Navigator was lost for words. He blinked, then got up from behind the table and bent down over the unconscious Northman, ripped off a strip of his tattered shirt to use as a bandage. He paused, frowning, as though unsure where to begin.

  Jezal swallowed. His sword was still in his hand, but he seemed to lack the strength to put it away. Bits of the unfortunate Practical were scattered around the room, stuck to the walls, the ceiling, the people. Jezal had never seen a man die before, let alone in so hideous and unnatural a fashion. He supposed he should have been horrified, but instead he felt only an overpowering sense of relief. His worries seemed now rather petty things.

  He, at least, was still alive.

  The Tools we Have

  Glokta stood in the narrow hallway, leaning on his cane and waiting. On the other side of the door, he could hear raised voices.

  ‘I said, no visitors!’

  He sighed to himself. He had many better things to do than to stand around here on his aching leg, but he had given his word and he meant to keep it. A pokey, unremarkable hallway in a pokey, unremarkable house among many hundreds of others the same. The whole district was recently built, terraces of houses in the new fashion: half-timbered, three stories, good perhaps for a family and a couple of servants. Hundreds of houses, one very much like another. Houses for the gentlefolk. The new rich. Jumped-up commoners, Sult would probably have called them. Bankers, merchants, artisans, shop keepers, clerks. Perhaps the odd town-house of some successful gentleman farmer, like this one here.

  The voices had stopped now. Glokta heard movement, some clinking of glass, then the door opened a crack and the maid peered out. An ill-favoured girl with big, watery eyes. She looked scared and guilty. Still, I am used to that. Everyone seems scared and guilty around the Inquisition.

  ‘She’ll see you now,’ the girl mumbled. Glokta nodded and shuffled past her into the room beyond.

  He had some hazy memories of staying with West’s family for a week or two one summer, up in Angland, a dozen years ago perhaps, although it seemed more like a hundred. He remembered fencing with West in the courtyard of their house, of being watched every day by a dark-haired girl with a serious face. He remembered meeting a young woman in the park not long ago, who had asked him how he was. He had been in a lot of pain at the time, scarcely seeing straight, and her face was a blur in his memory. So it was that Glokta was not sure what to expect, but he certainly had not expected the bruises. He was a touch shocked, for a moment. Though I hide it well.

  Dark, purple and brown and yellow, under her left eye, the lower lid well swollen. Round the corner of her mouth too, the lip split and scabbed over. Glokta knew a lot about bruises, few men more. And I hardly think she got these by accident. She was punched in the face, by someone who meant it. He looked at those ugly marks, and he thought about his old friend Collem West, crying in his dining room and begging for help, and he put the two together.

  Interesting.

  She sat there, all the while, looking back at him with her chin high, the side of her face with the worst bruises turned towards him, as though challenging him to say something. She is not much like to her brother. Not much like at all. I don’t think she’ll be bursting into tears in my dining room, or anywhere else.

  ‘What can I do for you, Inquisitor?’ she asked him coldly. He detected the very slightest slurring of the word Inquisitor. She has been drinking . . . though she hides it well. Not enough to make her stupid. Glokta pursed his lips. For some reason he had the feeling that he needed to watch his step.

  ‘I’m not here in a professional capacity. Your brother asked me to—’

  She cut him off rudely. ‘Did he? Really? Here to make sure I don’t fuck the wrong man, are you?’ Glokta waited for a moment, allowing that to sink in, then he began to chuckle softly to himself. Oh, that’s grand! I begin to quite like her! ‘Something funny?’ she snapped.

  ‘Pardon me,’ said Glokta, wiping his running eye with a finger, ‘but I spent two years in the Emperor’s prisons. I daresay, if I had known I’d be there half that long at the start, I would have made a more concerted effort to kill myself. Seven hundred days, give or take, in the darkness. As close to hell, I would have thought, as a living man can go. My point is this—if you mean to upset me you’ll need more than harsh language.’

  Glokta treated her to his most revolting, toothless, crazy smile. There were few people indeed who could stomach that for long, but she did not look away for an instant. Soon, in fact, she was smiling back at him. A lop-sided grin of her own, and one which he found oddly disarming. A different tack, perhaps.

  ‘The fact is, your brother asked me to look after your welfare while he is away. As far as I’m concerned you can fuck whomever you please, though my general observation has been that, as far as the reputations of young women are concerned, the less fucking the better. The reverse is true for young men of course. Hardly fair, but then life is unfair in so many ways, this one hardly seems worth commenting on.’

  ‘Huh. You’re right there.’

  ‘Good,’ said Glokta, ‘so we understand each other then. I see that you hurt your face.’

  She shrugged. ‘I fell. I’m a clumsy fool.’

  ‘I know how you feel. I’m such a fool I knocked half my teeth out and hacked my leg to useless pulp. Look at me now, a cripple. It’s amazing where a little foolishness can take you, if it goes unchecked. We clumsy types should stick together, don’t you think?’

  She looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, stroking the bruises on her jaw. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I suppose we should.’

  Goyle’s Practical, Vitari, was sprawled on a chair opposite Glokta, just outside the huge dark doors to the Arch Lector’s office. She was slumped into it, poured onto it, draped over it like a wet cloth, long limbs dangling, head resting on the back. Her eyes twitched lazily around the room from time to time under heavy lids, sometimes coming to rest on Glokta himself for insultingly long periods. She never turned her head though, or indeed moved a muscle, as though the effort might be too painful.

  Which, indeed, it probably would be.

  Plainly, she had been involved in a most violent melee, hand to hand. Above her black collar, her neck was a mass of mottled bruises. There were more around her black mask, a lot more, and a long cut across her forehead. One of her drooping hands was heavily bandaged, the knuckles of the other were scratched and scabbed over. She’s taken more than a couple of knocks. Fighting hard, against someone who meant business.

  The tiny bell jumped and tinkled. ‘Inquisitor Glokta,’ said the secretary, as he hurried out from behind his desk to open the door, ‘his Eminence will see you now.’

  Glokta sighed, grunted and heaved on his cane as he got to his feet. ‘Good luck,’ said the woman as he limped past.

  ‘What?’

  She gave a barely perceptible nod towards the Arch Lector’s office. ‘He’s in a hell of a mood today.’

  As the door opened, Sult’s voice washed out into the ante-room, changing from a muffled murmuring into an all-out scream. The secretary jerked back from the gap as if slapped in the face.

  ‘Twenty Practicals!’ shrieked the Arch Lector, from beyond the archway. ‘Twenty! We should have been questioning that bitch now, instead of sitting here, licking our wounds! How many Practicals?’

  ‘Twenty, Arch Lec—’

  ‘Twenty! Damn it!’ Glokta took a deep breath and insinuated himself through the door. ‘And how many dead?’ The Arch Lector was striding briskly up and down the tiled floor of his huge circular office, waving his long arms in the air. He was dressed all in white, as spotless as ever. Though I fancy a hair is
out of place, maybe even two. He must truly be in a fury. ‘How many?’

  ‘Seven,’ mumbled Superior Goyle, hunched into his chair.

  ‘A third of them! A third! How many injured?’

  ‘Eight.’

  ‘Most of the rest! Against how many?’

  ‘In all, there were six—’

  ‘Really?’ The Arch Lector thumped his fists on the table, leaning down over the shrinking Superior. ‘I heard two. Two!’ he screamed, pacing once more round and round the table, ‘and both of them savages! Two I heard! A white one and a black one, and the black one a woman! A woman!’ He kicked savagely at the chair next to Goyle and it wobbled back and forth on its feet. ‘And what’s worse, there were countless witnesses to this disgrace! Did I not say discreet? What part of the word discreet is beyond your comprehension, Goyle?’

  ‘But Arch Lector, circumstances cannot—’

  ‘Cannot?’ Sult’s screech rose an entire octave higher. ‘Cannot? How dare you give me cannot, Goyle? Discreet I asked for, and you gave me bloody slaughter across half the Agriont, and failed into the bargain! We look like fools! Far worse, we look like weak fools! My enemies on the Closed Council will waste no time in turning this farce to their advantage. Marovia’s already stirring trouble, the old windbag, whining about liberty and tighter reins and all the rest of it! Damn lawyers! They had their way, we’d get nothing done! And you’re making it happen, Goyle! I’m stalling, and I’m saying sorry, and I’m trying to put things in the best light, but a turd’s a turd, whatever light it’s in! Do you have any notion of the damage you’ve inflicted? Of the months of hard work you’ve undone?’

  ‘But, Arch Lector, have they not now left the—’