A Little Hatred

by Joe Abercrombie

  “Well, yes, but one forced upon us—”

  “Those are no cheaper, Your Highness.”

  “No cheaper?” muttered Orso.

  “Over the past twenty years, your father—encouraged by Her Majesty Queen Terez—has fought three wars in Styria for the sake of your birthright, the Grand Duchy of Talins.”

  “I wish he’d asked my opinion.” Orso gave what he hoped was a disarming chuckle. “I scarcely want one nation, let alone two.”

  “That is just as well, Your Highness, since the Union lost all three wars.”

  “Come now, couldn’t we call that middle one a draw?”

  “We could, but I doubt anyone who fought in it would agree, and from a financial standpoint, victories are hardly to be preferred. To pay for those wars, I have been obliged to impose stringent taxes on the peasantry, on the merchants, on the provinces and, finally, with great reluctance, on the nobles. The nobles, in response, have consolidated their holdings, turned tenants off their estates and passed laws in the Open Council seizing and enclosing common land. People have flooded from the country into the cities and upset the whole system of taxation entirely. The Crown has been obliged to borrow heavily. More heavily, I should say. The debts owed to the banking house of Valint and Balk alone are…” Gorodets spent a moment scouring his vocabulary for a word of sufficient scale, and finally gave up. “Difficult to describe. Between the two of us, just the interest represents a significant proportion of the nation’s expenditure.”

  “That much?”

  “More. It is a thoroughly parlous situation, with acrimony boiling in every quarter. To find additional funds now is… unthinkable.”

  Orso listened with mounting horror. “Lord Chancellor, all I am asking for is the money for five thousand soldiers—”

  “All, Your Highness?” Gorodets looked over his lenses like a tutor at a disappointing pupil, a look unpleasantly familiar to Orso from his actual tutors. Anyone in a position of authority, come to think of it. “Are you aware of how great a sum that is?”

  Orso restrained his mounting frustration. “But you must see we have to do something about these Northmen!”

  “I am afraid what I see is beside the point, Your Highness. I am a glorified accountant, and not even that glorified.” He waved a hand at his cavernous office, every surface panelled with marble or encrusted with gold leaf, the plaster-cast faces of his predecessors gazing down smugly from up near the ceiling. “I manage the books. I try to make sure that what goes out in expenditure is equalled by what comes in through taxation. In this, like every lord chancellor before me, I habitually fail. It may be given to me to hold the purse strings but… I do not set policy alone.”

  “Alone?”

  The lord chancellor gave a mirthless little chuckle as he wiped his lenses with a corner of his fur robe and held them up to the light. “I barely set policy at all.”

  “Who does?”

  “It is His Eminence Arch Lector Glokta who takes the lead in setting the priorities of the Closed Council.”

  Orso sagged unhappily back into his chair. He remembered now why he had abandoned government and channelled his energies into women and wine. “It’s a question of priorities, then?”

  “Your Highness,” and the lord chancellor perched his lenses back on his nose, “it is always a question of priorities.”

  “Your Eminence,” said Orso. “Thank you so much for seeing me at such short notice. I know you must be a very busy man.”

  “To you, Your Highness, my door stands always open.”

  “Must cause a hell of a draught!” Arch Lector Glokta produced a false smile, displaying that hideous gap in his teeth. Orso wondered yet again how this monstrous remnant of a man could have had a hand in producing something so altogether magnificent as his daughter. “I wish to talk to you about the unfortunate situation in the North—”

  “I would not call it unfortunate.”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “Scale Ironhand, his brother Black Calder and his son Stour Nightfall have invaded our Protectorate and burned the capital of our long-standing ally. That is not misfortune. That is a calculated act of war.”

  “That’s worse.”

  “Far worse.”

  “We should chastise these invaders, then!” said Orso, whacking his fist into his open palm.

  “We should.” Though something in the way the Arch Lector said “should” suggested he didn’t think they would.

  Orso paused, wondering how to frame it, but straightforward was usually best. “I wish to lead the expedition against them.”

  “Then I applaud your patriotic sentiments, Your Highness.” To give Glokta his due, he showed not the slightest trace of mockery. “But this is a military matter. Perhaps you should raise it with Lord Marshal Brint—”

  “I did. He led me by a roundabout route to Lord Chancellor Gorodets, who led me by a roundabout route to you. I followed the power, you might say, to your door.” And he grinned. “Which stands always open to me.”

  The Arch Lector’s narrow left eye twitched and Orso inwardly cursed. These flourishes of cleverness never did him the slightest good. He would get further with powerful men if they thought they were indulging an idiot. They probably were, after all.

  “My father has given me leave to go,” he went on. “Lord Marshal Brint can supply the officers. What I am lacking are the men. Or, more precisely, the money to pay and outfit them. Five thousand of the blighters, to be precise.”

  His Eminence sat back and regarded Orso with those sunken, feverishly bright eyes. Not a pleasant gaze to endure, by any means. Orso was glad he had only to endure it here, on the ground floor of the House of Questions, and not below.

  “Do you know my daughter, Your Highness?”

  A chilly breeze drifted through the Arch Lector’s stark, hard office then, making the great heaps of papers on the tables shift and crackle like restless spirits. For a moment, Orso found himself wondering how many of them were the confessions of guilty traitors. Or innocent ones. But he was decidedly pleased with the way he kept his face blank, despite the sudden surge of guilty horror, not to mention healthy fear, produced by the question. Orso might not have excelled in all the areas his mother would have liked, but at feigning ignorance he was a master. Perhaps because he had so much real ignorance to draw on.

  “Your daughter… Sarene, is it?”

  “Savine.”

  “Savine, of course. I believe we’ve met… somewhere.” Indeed, his tongue had met her quim and her mouth his cock not long ago and they had all got on bloody famously. He cleared his throat, aware of a swelling in his trousers by no means appropriate during a meeting with the most feared man in the Union. “Charming girl… as I recall.”

  “Do you know what she does?”

  “Does?” Orso was starting to wonder if His Eminence had found out all about their little arrangement, in spite of the exhaustive precautions Savine insisted on. He was a man whose job it was to find things out, after all, and he was very, very good at his job. And that was not the sum of his job. Orso was confident the heir to the throne would not be bobbing to the surface of a canal any time soon, bloated by seawater and horribly mutilated, but… the Arch Lector would be a bad man to upset. The worst. “Young ladies do a lot of sewing, I understand?”

  “She is an investor,” said Glokta.

  Orso played the dunce, waving one hand so his lace cuff flapped about the fingers. “A kind of… merchant?”

  “A merchant in inventions. Machines. Manufactories. Better ways of doing things. She buys ideas and makes them real.”

  Orso could not, in fact, have been more awed and mystified by what Savine did if she had been a magus practising High Art, but he thought it might suit the role better if he barked out a mildly contemptuous laugh. “How thoroughly…modern.”

  “Thoroughly modern. In my youth, for someone to make a considerable fortune in that way, let alone a woman, would have been unthinkable. Savine may
be a pioneer, but there are others following. We are entering a new age, Your Highness.”

  “We are?”

  “My daughter recently helped finance the building of a large mill near Keln.” And His Eminence pointed with one pale, knobbly finger across the map of the Union carved into the tabletop between them, towards what looked like nothing so much as an old, stained nail mark. “In that mill is a machine, operated by one man and powered by a waterwheel, that can card as much wool in a day as nine men could the old way.”

  “I suppose that’s a fine thing for the wool trade?” offered Orso, baffled.

  “It is. A fine thing for my daughter and her partners, too. But it is not so fine a thing for those other eight men, who used to card wool and are now looking for a new way to feed their families.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “And the very clever man who came up with that machine—a Gurkish refugee by the name of Masrud—has just come up with another that spins the carded wool into thread. Each one of those puts six women out of work. And they’re not happy about it.”

  “Arch Lector, fascinated though I am by your daughter’s exploits,” and he bloody was, he was having to cross his legs at the thought of her to prevent embarrassment, “I’m not sure how they relate to our Northern troubles—”

  “Change, Your Highness. At a pace and of a kind that has never been seen before. An order that has stood for centuries buckles and twists. Traditional barriers, however we might try to shore them up, collapse like sandcastles before the tide. Men fear to lose what they have, covet what they do not. It is a time of chaos. Of fear.” The Arch Lector shrugged, tentatively, as though even that gave him pain. “A time of opportunity, if you are as clever as my daughter, but a time of great danger, too. Not long ago, the Inquisition rooted out a scheme, devised by a group of disaffected labourers, to burn down that mill I told you of and raise the workers against your father’s government.”

  “Ah.”

  “Every day, threats are sent to the owners of manufactories. Every night, workers with soot-smeared faces cause wanton damage to machinery. In Hocksted, yesterday morning, the funeral of an agitator devolved into a full-scale riot.”

  “Ah.”

  “Below us, in the cells, are members of the group called the Breakers, apprehended only last night in the act of blowing up a foundry not two miles from where we sit. We are even now persuading them to help us uproot a conspiracy that spans the breadth of the nation.”

  Orso’s eyes rolled down towards the floor. “That sounds… bad.” He wasn’t sure whether he was thinking of the plot or the fate of the plotters. Perhaps both.

  “There is disloyalty everywhere. Treason everywhere. People love to say that things have never been so bad—”

  Orso smiled. “They do, they do.”

  “But things really have never been so bad.”

  Orso’s smile vanished. “Ah.”

  “I wish we were free to do what we thought right. I truly do.” The Arch Lector glanced up at a huge, dark portrait on the wall. Some fearsome bald bureaucrat of the past, glowering down watchfully upon the little people. Zoller, maybe. “But we simply cannot risk any overseas adventures, however well intentioned, however deeply desired, however apparently necessary.” He clasped his long, thin hands and gazed levelly at Orso, eyes glittering in skull-like sockets. “Put simply, the government of the Union hangs by a thread and must look first to its own security. To the legacy of the king. To the position of his heir.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to interfere with your making his position comfortable.” Orso gave a helpless shrug. He was quite out of ideas. “It’s a question of politics, then?”

  “Your Highness,” and Arch Lector Glokta smiled, once again displaying that yawning gap in his front teeth. “It is always a question of politics.”

  Orso shuffled through his hand again, but it was as awful as it had been when it was dealt.

  “I fold,” he grunted, tossing his cards down in disgust. “What a pig of a day. Makes you wonder how anything gets done.”

  “Or realise why nothing does,” said Tunny as he raked in the pot.

  “It gives me scant enthusiasm for the job of being king, that’s sure.”

  “Not that you had much in the first place.”

  “No. One begins to understand why my father is… how he is.”

  “Ineffectual, you mean?” Yolk chuckled. “He must be the most ineffec—”

  Orso grabbed a fistful of his shirt and dragged him half out of his chair. “I get to mock him,” he snarled in Yolk’s shocked face. “You fucking don’t.”

  “There’s no point bullying that idiot,” said Tunny, managing to smoke a chagga pipe, stare at Orso through narrowed eyes and deal expertly all at once. “He’s an idiot.”

  Yolk spread his palms in mute agreement, and Orso gave a disgusted hiss and dumped him back in his chair, sweeping up his new hand and casting a lazy eye over it. It was every bit as awful as the last. But perhaps good card players are the ones who can win with bad cards.

  “Forget those old bastards in the government.” Tunny pointed at Orso with the stem of his pipe. “They’ve no vision. No audacity. We need to look at this another way. We need to frame it as a bet.” And he tossed a couple of silvers into the empty centre of the table. “You need someone with money. With ambition. With patience. Someone who’ll see a few favours from you down the line as a solid gamble.”

  “Won’t be me,” said Yolk, sadly, tossing his hand away.

  “Rich, ambitious and patient,” mused Orso, frowning at those two glinting coins. “A gamble. Or… an investment? Pass me that pencil.” And Orso scrawled a few words across one of his playing cards, folded it and held it out. “Could you take this to the usual place, Hildi?” And he gave her a meaningful waggle of the brows. “An invitation to Sworbreck’s office. Ten bits in it if you’re quick.”

  “Twenty and it’ll be there yesterday,” said Hildi, hopping off the settle and sticking her chin up at him as though it was a loaded flatbow and she a highwayman.

  “Twenty it is, you bandit. How much do I owe you now?”

  “Seventeen marks and eight bits.”

  “Already?”

  “I’m never wrong about numbers,” she said solemnly.

  “She’s never wrong about numbers,” said Tunny, shifting his chagga pipe from one side of his mouth to the other using only tongue and teeth.

  “She is never wrong about numbers,” said Orso, counting out the coins.

  Hildi snatched them from his hand, stuck them into her cap, twisted it down hard onto her mass of blonde curls and slipped out through the door nimbly as a cat.

  “How’re we going to play with a card missing?” grumbled Yolk.

  “You manage it without looks, wits or money,” said Orso, sorting through his hand again. “You can manage without one card.”

  Sore Spots

  “How the hell did you get that bruise?”

  Savine put her fingers to her mouth. She had powdered carefully but her mother, while oblivious to so much, had an uncanny eye for injuries. “Don’t worry, it’s nothing. I was fencing. With Bremer dan Gorst.”

  “Fencing? With Bremer dan bloody Gorst? For such a clever girl, you do some witless things.”

  Savine winced at the pain through her ribs as she shifted in her chair. “I’ll admit it was far from my best idea.”

  “Does your father know about this?”

  “He presided over it. I’ve a feeling he was thoroughly tickled, in fact.”

  “He bloody would be. The only thing he enjoys more than his own suffering is other people’s. Why you play with swords is quite beyond me.”

  “It’s fine exercise. Keeps me strong. Keeps me… focused.”

  “What you need is less focus and more fun.” Her mother drained her glass with a practised toss of her head. “You should get married.”

  “So I can be ordered around by some idiot? Thank you, no.”

  �
��Then don’t marry an idiot. Marry a rich man who likes men. At least you’ll have that in common.” She peered thoughtfully up at the ceiling. “Or at least marry a pretty idiot, then you’ve something nice to look at while you regret it.”

  “That was your plan, was it?” asked Savine, sipping her own drink.

  “Actually yes, but when I got to the counter, all they had left was the crippled mastermind.”

  Savine laughed so suddenly she blew wine out of her nose, had to jerk from her chair so she didn’t spatter it down her dress, and ended up flicking it on the carpet in a most unladylike manner.

  Her mother chuckled at her discomfort, then sighed. “And do you know?” She gave the monstrous diamond on her wedding band a lopsided grin. “I haven’t regretted a day of it.”

  There was a sharp knock at the door and Zuri slipped through with the book under one arm, leaning close to murmur in Savine’s ear. “A few decisions to be made, my lady. Then dinner with the loose-tongued but tight-fisted Tilde dan Rucksted and her husband. An opportunity to discuss their investment in Master Kort’s canal.”

  Savine’s turn to sigh. Another of the lord marshal’s tales of derring-do on the frontier and she might be obliged to drown herself in the canal rather than extend it. But business was business.

  Savine’s mother was pouring herself another glass of wine. “What is it, darling?”

  “I have to dress for dinner.”

  “Now?” She stuck her lip out in a needy pout. “How bloody tiresome. I was hoping we could talk tonight.”

  “We just did.”

  “Not like we used to, Savine! I’ve a hundred cutting comments just as funny as the last one.”

  Savine set down her glass and followed Zuri to the door. “Keep them dry for next time, Mother. It’s business.”

  “Business.” Her mother wiped the drip from the side of the decanter and sucked her finger. “These days, you are all business.”

  “Tighter,” hissed Savine through gritted teeth, fists clenched on her dressing table, and she heard Freid hiss with effort as she hauled on the laces.

  It was an informal event, so it only took four of them to dress her. Freid was handling the wardrobe on her own. Lisbit was face-maid, on paint, powder and perfume. Metello—a hatchet-featured Styrian who had once been chief dresser to the Duchess of Affoia—barely spoke a word of common but expressed herself with unmatched eloquence through the medium of wigs. Zuri, meanwhile, attended to book and jewels and ensured that the others did not make a mess of anything all at once.