Joe Abercrombie - The Blade Itself

Logen stood, hands on hips, gawping at the enormous wooden skeleton, but its purpose was a mystery. He stepped up to a short muscular man in a leather apron, sawing furiously at a plank. “What’s this?”

“Eh?” The man didn’t even look up from his task.

“This. What’s it for?”

The saw bit through the wood, the off-cut clattered to the ground. The carpenter hefted the rest of the plank onto a pile nearby. He turned round, eyeing Logen suspiciously, wiping sweat from his glistening forehead.

“Stands. Seating.” Logen stared vacantly back at him. How could something stand and sit at once? “For the Contest!” the carpenter shouted in his face. Logen backed slowly away. Gibberish. Nonsense words. He turned and hurried off, keeping well clear of the huge wooden structures and the men clambering over them.

He blundered out onto a broad lane, a deep gorge between looming white buildings. Statues faced each other down either side, much larger than life, frowning over the heads of the many people hurrying between. The nearest of the carvings seemed strangely familiar. Logen walked over to it, looked it up and down, then grinned to himself. The First of the Magi had gained some weight since it was sculpted. Too much good eating at the library, maybe. Logen turned towards a small man with a black hat, walking by with a big book under his arm.

“Bayaz,” he said, pointing up at the statue. “Friend of mine.” The man stared at him, at the statue, back at him, and hurried away.

The carvings marched on down either side of the avenue. Kings of the Union, Logen guessed, stood in line on the left. Some carried swords, some scrolls or tiny ships. One had a dog at his feet, another a sheaf of wheat under his arm, but otherwise there wasn’t much to tell them apart. They all had the same tall crowns and the same stern frowns. You wouldn’t have thought to look at them that they’d ever said a stupid word, or done a stupid thing, or had to take a shit in all their lives.

Logen heard rapid footsteps thumping up behind him, and he turned just in time to see the proud young man from the gate, pounding down the avenue, shirt soaked through with sweat. Logen wondered where he might be going in such a hurry, but he was damned if he was going to run to catch up with him, not in this heat. Anyway, there were plenty more mysteries that needed solving.

The lane opened out into a great, green space, scooped out from the country by giant hands and dropped in amongst the tall buildings, but like no countryside that Logen had ever seen. The grass was a smooth, even blanket of vivid green, shaved almost to the ground. There were flowers, but growing in rows and circles and straight lines of bright colour. There were lush bushes and trees, all squeezed and fenced and clipped into unnatural shapes. There was water, too—streams bubbling over stone steps, a great flat pond with sad-looking trees trailing round its edge.

Logen wandered through this square-edged greenery, boots crunching on a path made of tiny grey stones. There were lots of people gathered here, squeezed in together to enjoy the sun. They sat in boats on the miniature lake, rowing gently round and round, going nowhere. They lazed on the lawns, ate, drank and babbled to one another. Some of them would point at Logen and shout, or whisper, or slope away.

They were a strange-seeming crowd, especially the women. Pale and ghostly, swaddled in elaborate dresses, hair scraped up and piled and stuck through with pins and combs and great weird feathers or useless tiny hats. They seemed like the big jar in the round chamber—too thin and delicate to be any use, and further spoiled by too much decoration. But it had been a long time, and he smiled at them cheerfully, on the off chance. Some looked shocked, others gasped in horror. Logen sighed. The old magic was still there.

Further on, in another wide square, Logen stopped to watch a group of soldiers practice. These weren’t beggars, or girlish youths, these were solid-looking men wearing heavy armour, breastplates and greaves polished mirror bright, long spears shouldered. They stood together, each man the same as the one beside, in four squares of maybe fifty men each, still as the statues in the avenue.

At a bellow from a short man in a red jacket—their chief, Logen reckoned—the whole crowd turned, levelled their spears and began to advance across the square, heavy boots tramping together. Each man the same, armed the same, moving the same. It was quite a sight, all that shining metal moving steadily in bristling squares, spear points glittering, like some great square hedgehog with two hundred legs. Deadly enough, no doubt, on a big flat space, against an imaginary enemy right in front. How it would work on broken rocks, in the tipping rain, in a tangled wood, Logen was less sure. Those men would tire quickly, in all that weight of armour, and if the squares could be broken, what would they do? Men who were used to always having others at their shoulder? Could they fight alone?

He plodded on, through wide courtyards and neat gardens, past gurgling fountains and proud statues, down clean lanes and broad avenues. He wandered up and down narrow stairways, across bridges over streams, over roads, over other bridges. He saw guards in a dozen different splendid liveries, guarding a hundred different gates and walls and doors, every one eyeing him with the same deep suspicion. The sun climbed in the sky, the tall white buildings slid by until Logen was footsore and half lost, his neck aching from looking always upwards.

The only constant was the monstrous tower which loomed high, high over everything else, making the greatest of the great buildings seem mean. It was always there, glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, peering over the tops of the roofs in the distance. Logen’s footsteps dragged him slowly closer and closer to it, until he came to a neglected corner of the citadel in its very shadow.

He found an old bench beside a ragged lawn near a great crumbling building, coated with moss and ivy, its steep roofs sagging in the middles and missing tiles. He slumped down, puffing out his cheeks, and frowned up at that enormous shape beyond the walls, cut out dark against the blue, a man made mountain of dry, stark, dead stones. No plants clung to that looming mass, not even a clump of moss in the cracks between the great blocks. The House of the Maker, Bayaz had called it. It looked like no house that Logen had ever seen. There were no roofs above, no doors or windows in those naked walls. A cluster of mighty, sharp-edged tiers of rock. What need could there ever be to build a thing so big? Who was this Maker anyway? Was this all he made? A great big, useless house?

“You mind if I sit?” There was a woman looking down at Logen, more what he would have called a woman than those strange, ghostly things in the park. A pretty woman in a white dress, face framed by dark hair.

“Do I mind? No. It’s a funny thing, but no one else wants to sit with me.”

She dropped down at the far end of the bench, resting her chin on her hands, her elbows on her knees, gazing up without interest at the looming tower. “Perhaps they’re afraid of you.”

Logen watched a man hurry past with a sheaf of papers under his arm, staring at him with wide eyes. “I’m starting to think the same thing.”

“You do look a little dangerous.”

“Hideous is the word you’re looking for.”

“I usually find the words I’m looking for, and I say dangerous.”

“Well, looks can lie.”

She lifted an eyebrow, looking him slowly up and down. “You must be a man of peace then.”

“Huh… not entirely.” They looked at each other sidelong. She didn’t seem afraid, or scornful, or even interested. “Why aren’t you scared?”