Last Argument of Kings tfl-3

by Joe Abercrombie

“But, your Eminence, you must see that this is all according to Bayaz’ plans—”

  “We will deal with that old fool later. I am taking advice.” Sult turned to hiss at Marovia without waiting for a reply. Now the two old men looked out at the Open Council, now they gave their nods and their signals to the men they controlled. All the while, Bayaz smiled. The way an engineer might smile as his new machine works for the first time, precisely according to his design. The Magus caught Glokta’s eye, and gave the faintest of nods. There was nothing for Glokta to do but shrug, and give a toothless grin of his own. I wonder if the time may come when we all wish we had voted for Brock.

  Now Marovia was speaking hurriedly to Hoff. The Lord Chamberlain frowned, nodded, turned towards the house and signalled to the Announcer, who beat furiously on the floor for silence.

  “My Lords of the Open Council!” Hoff roared, once something resembling quiet had been established. “The discovery of a natural son plainly changes the complexion of this debate! Fate would appear to have gifted us the opportunity to continue the dynasty of Arnault without further doubt or conflict!” Fate gifts us? I rather think we have a less disinterested benefactor. “In view of these exceptional circumstances, and the strong support already voiced by members of this house, the Closed Council judges that an exceptional vote should now be taken. A single vote, on whether the man previously known as Jezal dan Luthar should be declared High King of the Union forthwith!”

  “No!” roared Brock, veins bulging from his neck. “I strongly protest!” But he might as well have protested against the incoming tide. The arms were already shooting up in daunting numbers. The Aldermen of Westport, the supporters of Lord Isher, the votes that Sult and Marovia had bullied and bribed their way. Glokta saw many more, now, men he had thought undecided, or firmly declared for one man or another. All lending their support to Luthar with a speed that strongly implies a previous arrangement. Bayaz sat back, arms folded, as he watched the hands shoot skywards. It was already becoming terribly clear that over half of the room was in favour.

  “Yes!” hissed the Arch Lector, a smile of triumph on his face. “Yes!”

  Those who had not raised their arms, men committed to Brock, or Barezin, or Heugen, stared about them, stunned and not a little horrified at how quickly the world seemed to have passed them by. How quickly the chance at power has slipped through their fingers. And who can blame them? It has been a surprising day for us all.

  Lord Brock made one last effort, raising a finger to stab at Luthar, still goggling by the wall. “What proof have you that he is the son of anyone in particular, beside the word of this old liar?” and he gestured at Bayaz. “What proof, my Lords? I demand proof!”

  Angry mutterings swept up and down the benches, but no one made themselves conspicuous. The second time Lord Brock has stood before this Council and demanded proof, and the second time no one has cared. What proof could there be, after all? A birthmark on Luthar’s arse in the shape of a crown? Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes. And most of us would far rather have a King with no friends and no enemies, than a King with plenty of both. Most of us would rather have things stay as they are, than risk an uncertain future.

  More hands were raised, and more. Luthar’s support had rolled too far for any one man to stop it. Now it is like a great boulder hurtling down a slope. They dare not stand in its way in case they are squashed to gravy. So they crowd in behind, and add their own weight to it, and hope to snatch the scraps up afterward.

  Brock turned, a deadly frown across his face, and he stormed down the aisle and out of the chamber. Probably he had hoped that a good part of the Open Council would storm out with him. But in that, as in so much else today, he must be harshly disappointed. No more than a dozen of his most loyal followers accompanied him on the lonely march out of the Lords’ Round. The others have better sense. Lord Isher exchanged a long look with Bayaz, then raised his pale hand. Lords Barezin and Heugen watched the best part of their support flocking to the cause of the young pretender, glanced at each other, retreated back into their seats and stayed carefully silent. Skald opened his mouth to call out, looked about him, thought better of it, and with evident reluctance, slowly lifted his arm.

  There were no further protests.

  King Jezal the First was raised to the throne by near-unanimous accord.

  The Trap

  Coming up into the High Places again, and the air felt crisp and clear, sharp and familiar in Logen’s throat. Their march had begun gently as they came up through the woods, a rise you’d hardly notice. Then the trees thinned out and their path took them up a valley between grassy fells, cracked with trickling streams, patched with sedge and gorse. Now the valley had narrowed to a gorge, hemmed in on both sides with slopes of bare rock and crumbling scree, getting always steeper. Above them, on either side of that gorge, two great crags rose up. Beyond, the hazy hints of mountain peaks—grey, and light grey, and even lighter grey, melted in the distance into the heavy grey sky.

  The sun was out, and meaning business, and it was hot to walk in, bright to squint into. They were all weary from climbing, and worrying, and looking behind them for Bethod. Four hundred Carls, maybe, and as many painted-face hillmen, all spread out in a great long column, cursing and spitting, boots crunching and sliding in the dry dirt and the loose stones. Crummock’s daughter was struggling up ahead of Logen, bent double under the weight of her father’s hammer, hair round her face dark with sweat. Logen’s own daughter would have been older than that, by now. If she hadn’t been killed by the Shanka, along with her mother and her brothers. That thought gave Logen a hollow, guilty feeling. A bad one.

  “You want a hand with that mallet, girl?”

  “No I fucking don’t!” she screamed at him, then dropped it off her shoulder and dragged it away up the slope by the handle, scowling at him all the way, the hammer’s head clattering along and leaving a groove in the stony soil. Logen blinked after her. Seemed his touch with the women went all the way down to ones ten years old.

  Crummock came up behind him, fingerbones swinging round his neck. “Fierce, ah? Y’ave to be fierce, to get on in my family!” He leaned close and gave a wink. “And she’s the fiercest of the lot, that little bitch. If I’m honest, she’s my favourite.” He shook his head as he watched her dragging at that hammer. “She’ll make some poor bastard one hell of a wife one day. We’re here, in case you were wondering.”

  “Eh?” Logen wiped sweat from his face, frowning as he stared about. “Where’s the—”

  Then he realised. Crummock’s fortress, if you could call it that, was right ahead of them.

  The valley was no more than a hundred strides now from one cliff to the other, and a wall was built across it. An ancient and crumbling wall of rough blocks, so full of cracks, so coated with creeper, brambles, seeding grass, that it seemed almost part of the mountains. It wasn’t a whole lot steeper than the valley itself, and as tall as three men on each other’s shoulders at its highest, sagging here and there as if it was about to fall down on its own. In the centre was a gate of weathered grey planks, splattered with lichen, managing to seem rotten and dried-out both at once.

  To one side of the wall there was a tower, built up against the cliff. Or at least there was a great natural pillar sticking out from the rock with half-cut chunks of stone mortared to the top, making a wide platform on the cliff-side, overlooking the wall from high above. Logen looked at the Dogman as he trudged up, and the Dogman squinted at that wall as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  “This is it?” growled Dow, coming up next to them, his lip curling. A few trees had taken root at one side, just under the tower, must have been fifty years ago at least. Now they loomed up over the wall. A man could have climbed them easily, and stepped inside the place without even stretching far.

  Tul stared up at th
e ragged excuse for a fortress. “A strong place in the mountains, you said.”

  “Strong… ish.” Crummock waved his hand. “We hillmen have never been much for building and so on. What were you expecting? Ten marble towers and a hall bigger’n Skarling’s?”

  “I was expecting a halfway decent wall, at least,” growled Dow.

  “Bah! Walls? I heard you were cold as snow and hot as piss, Black Dow, and now you want walls to hide behind?”

  “We’ll be outnumbered ten to one if Bethod does turn up, you mad fuck! You’re damn right I want a wall, and you told us there’d be one!”

  “But you said it yourself friend.” Crummock spoke soft and slow as though he was explaining it to a child, and he tapped at the side of his head with one thick finger. “I’m mad! Mad as a sack of owls, and everyone says so! I can’t remember the names of my own children. Who knows what I think a wall looks like? I hardly know what I’m talking of myself, most of the time, and you’re fool enough to listen to me? You must be mad yourselves!”

  Logen rubbed at the bridge of his nose and he gave a groan. The Dogman’s Carls were gathering near them now, looking up at that mossy heap of stones and muttering to each other, far from happy. Logen could hardly blame them. It was a long, hot walk they’d had to find this at the end of it. But they had no choices, as far as he could see. “It’s a bit late to build a better one,” he grumbled. “We’ll have to do what we can with what we’ve got.”

  “That’s it Bloody-Nine, you need no wall and you know it!” Crummock clapped Logen on the arm with his great fat hand. “You cannot die! You’re beloved of the moon, my fine new friend, above all others! You cannot die, not with the moon looking over you! You cannot—”

  “Shut up,” said Logen.

  They crunched sourly across the slope towards the gate. Crummock called out and the old doors wobbled open. A pair of suspicious hillmen stood on the other side, watching them come in. They slogged up a steep ramp cut into the rock, all tired and grumbling, and came out into a flat space above. A saddle between the two crags, might have been a hundred strides wide and two hundred long, sheer cliffs of stone all round. There were a few wooden shacks and sheds scattered about the edges, all green with old moss, a slumping stone hall built against the rock face with smoke rising out of a squat chimney. Just next to it a narrow stair was cut into the cliff, climbing up to the platform at the top of the tower.

  “Nowhere to run to,” Logen muttered, “if things turn sour.”

  Crummock only grinned the wider. “Course not. That’s the whole point, ain’t it? Bethod’ll think he’s got us like beetles in a bottle.”

  “He will have,” growled the Dogman.

  “Aye, but then your friends will come up behind him and won’t he get the father of all shocks, though? It’ll almost be worth it for the look on his face, the shit-eating bastard!”

  Logen worked his mouth and spat onto the stony ground. “I wonder what the looks on our faces’ll be by then? All slack and corpse-like would be my guess.” A herd of shaggy sheep were pressed in tight together in a pen, staring around wide-eyed, bleating to each other. Hemmed in and helpless, and Logen knew exactly how they felt. From inside the fort, where the ground was a good deal higher, there was hardly a wall at all. You could’ve stepped up onto its walkway, if you’d got long legs, and stood at its crumbling, moss-ridden excuse for a parapet.

  “Don’t you worry your beautiful self about nothing, Bloody-Nine,” laughed Crummock. “My fortress could be better built, I’ll grant you, but the ground is with us, and the mountains, and the moon, all smiling on our bold endeavour. This is a strong place, with a strong history. Do you not know the story of Laffa the Brave?”

  “Can’t say that I do.” Logen wasn’t altogether sure he wanted to hear it now, but he was in the long habit of not getting what he wanted.

  “Laffa was a great bandit chief of the hillmen, a long time ago. He raided all the clans around for years, him and his brothers. One hot summer the clans had enough, so they banded together and hunted him in the mountains. Here’s where he made his last stand. Right here in this fortress. Laffa and his brothers and all his people.”

  “What happened?” asked Dogman.

  “They all got killed, and their heads cut off and put in a sack, and the sack was buried in the pit they used to shit in.” Crummock beamed. “Guess that’s why they call it a last stand, eh?”

  “That’s it? That’s the story?”

  “That’s all of it that I know, but I’m not right sure what else there could be. That was pretty much the end for Laffa, I’d say.”

  “Thanks for the encouragement.”

  “That’s alright, that’s alright! I’ve more stories, if you need more!”

  “No, no, that’s enough for me.” Logen turned and started walking off, the Dogman beside him. “You can tell me more once we’ve won!”

  “Ha ha, Bloody-Nine!” shouted Crummock after him, “that’ll be a story in itself, eh? You can’t fool me! You’re like I am, beloved of the moon! We fight hardest when our backs are to the mountains and there’s no way out! Tell me it ain’t so! We love it when we got no choices!”

  “Oh aye,” Logen muttered to himself as he stalked off towards the gate. “There’s nothing better than no choices.”

  Dogman stood at the foot o’ the wall, staring up at it, and wondering what to do to give him and the rest a better chance at living out the week.

  “It’d be a good thing to get all this creeper and grass cleared off it,” he said. “Makes it a damn sight easier to climb.”

  Tul raised an eyebrow. “You sure it ain’t all that plant that’s holding it together?”

  Grim tugged at a vine and a shower of dried-out mortar came with it.

  “Might be you’re right.” Dogman sighed. “Cut off what we can, then, eh? Some work at the top would be time well spent and all. Be nice to have a decent stack o’ stones to hide behind when Bethod starts shooting arrows at us.”

  “That it would,” said Tul. “And we could dig us a ditch down here in front, plant some stakes round the bottom, make it harder for ’em to get up close.”

  “Then close that gate, nail it shut, and wedge a load of rocks in behind it.”

  “We’ll have trouble getting out,” said Tul.

  Logen snorted. “Us getting out won’t be the pressing problem, I’m thinking.”

  “You’ve a point right there,” laughed Crummock, ambling up with a lit pipe in his fat fist. “It’s Bethod’s boys getting in that we should worry on.”

  “Getting these walls patched up would be a good start at settling my mind.” Dogman pointed at the trees grown up over the wall. “We need to get these cut down and cut up, carve us out some stone, mix us some mortar and all the rest. Crummock, you got people can do that? You got tools?”

  He puffed at his pipe, frowning at Dogman all the long while, then blew brown smoke. “I might have, but I won’t take my orders from such as you, Dogman. The moon knows my talents, and they’re for murder, not mortaring.” Grim rolled his eyes.

  “Who will you take orders from?” asked Logen.

  “I’ll take ’em from you, Bloody-Nine, and from no other! The moon loves you, and I love the moon, and you’re the man for—”

  “Then get your people together and get to fucking cutting wood and stone. I’m bored o’ your blather.”

  Crummock knocked out his ashes sourly against the wall. “You’re no fun at all, you boys, you do nothing but worry. You need to think on the sunny side o’ this. The worst that can happen is that Bethod don’t show!”

  “The worst?” Dogman stared at him. “You sure? What about if Bethod does come, and his Carls kick your wall over like a pile o’ turds and kill every last one of us?”

  Crummock’s brow furrowed. He frowned down at the ground. He squinted up at the clouds. “True,” he said, breaking out in a smile. “That is worse. You got a fast mind, lad.”

  Dogman gave a long sigh, and stared
down into the valley. The wall might not have been all they’d hoped for, but you couldn’t knock the position. Coming up that steep slope against a set of hard men, high above and with nothing to lose, ready and more’n able to kill you. That was no one’s idea o’ fun.

  “Tough to get organised down there,” said Logen, speaking Dogman’s own thoughts. “Specially with arrows plunging on you from above and nothing to hide behind. Hard to make numbers count. I wouldn’t much fancy trying it myself. How are we going to work it, if they come?”

  “I reckon we’ll make three crews.” Dogman nodded to the tower. “Me up there with five score or so o’ the best archers. Good spot to shoot from, that. Nice and high, and a good view of the front o’ the wall.”

  “Uh,” said Grim.

  “Maybe some strong lads to throw a rock or two.”

  “I’ll lob a rock,” said Tul.

  “Fair enough. Then the pick of our lads up on the wall, ready to take ’em on hand to hand, if they get up there. That’ll be your crew, I reckon, Logen. Dow and Shivers and Red Hat can be your seconds.”

  Logen nodded, not looking all that happy. “Aye, alright.”

  “Then Crummock up behind with his hillmen, ready to charge if they make it through the gate. If we last more’n a day, maybe you can swap over. Hillmen on the wall, Logen and the rest behind.”

  “That’s quite the plan for a little man!” Crummock clapped him on the shoulder with a huge hand and damn near knocked him on his face. “Like as not you had it from the moon while you slept! Ain’t one thing in it I’d change!” He slapped his meaty fist into his palm. “I love a good charge! I hope the Southerners don’t come, and leave more for the rest of us! I want to charge now!”

  “Good for you,” grunted Dogman. “Maybe we can find you a cliff to charge off.” He squinted into the sun, taking another look up at the wall that held all of their hopes. He wouldn’t have cared to try and climb it, not from this side, but it wasn’t halfway as high, or as thick, or as strong as he’d have liked. You don’t always get things the way you like, Threetrees would have said. But just once would’ve been nice.