Joe Abercrombie - Before They Are Hanged

He looked back to the pot, but there wasn’t much encouragement in it. Just porridge with some shreds of bacon and some chopped-up roots. There was nothing to hunt out here. Dead land meant what it said. The grass on the plain had dwindled to brown tufts and grey dust. He looked round the ruined shell of the house they’d pitched camp in. Firelight flickered on broken stone, crumbled render, ancient splintered wood. No ferns rooted in the cracks, no saplings in the earth floor, not even a shred of moss between the stones. Seemed to Logen as if no one but them had trodden there in centuries. Maybe they hadn’t.

Quiet too. Not much wind tonight. Only the soft crackling of the fire, and Bayaz’ voice mumbling away, lecturing his apprentice about something or other. Logen was good and glad the First of the Magi was awake again, even if he did look older and seem grimmer than ever. At least now Logen didn’t have to decide what to do. That had never worked out too well for anyone concerned.

“A clear night at last!” sang Brother Longfoot as he ducked under the lintel, pointing upwards with huge smugness. “A perfect sky for Navigation! The stars shine clearly for the first time in ten days and, I do declare, we are not a stride out from our chosen course! Not a foot! I have not led us wrong, my friends. No! That would not have been my way at all! Forty miles to Aulcus, as I reckon it, just as I told you!” No congratulations were forthcoming. Bayaz and Quai were deep in their ill-tempered muttering. Luthar was holding up the blade of his short sword and trying to find an angle where he could see his reflection. Ferro was frowning in her corner. Longfoot sighed and squatted down beside the fire. “Porridge again?” he muttered, peering into the pot and wrinkling up his nose.

“Afraid so.”

“Ah, well. The tribulations of the road, eh, my friend? There would be no glory in travel without the hardship.”

“Uh,” said Logen. He could have managed with a lot less glory if it meant a decent dinner. He prodded unhappily at the bubbling mush with a spoon.

Longfoot leaned over to mutter under his breath. “It would seem our illustrious employer is having some further troubles with his apprentice.” Bayaz’ lecture was growing steadily louder and more bad-tempered.

“…being handy with a pan is all very well, but the practice of magic is still your first vocation. There has been a distinct change in your attitude of late. A certain watchfulness and disobedience. I am beginning to suspect that you may prove a disappointing pupil.”

“And were you always a fine pupil?” There was a trace of a mocking smile on Quai’s face. “Was your own master never disappointed?”

“He was, and the consequences were dire. We all make mistakes. It is a master’s place to try to stop his students making the same ones.”

“Then perhaps you should tell me the history of your mistakes. I might learn to be a better student.”

Master and apprentice glared at each other over the fire. Logen did not like the look of Bayaz’ frown. He had seen such looks before on the First of the Magi, and the outcome had never been good. He couldn’t understand why Quai had shifted from abject obedience to sullen opposition in the space of a few weeks, but it wasn’t making anyone’s life easier. Logen pretended to be fascinated by the porridge, half-expecting to be suddenly deafened by the roar of searing flame. But when sound came it was only Bayaz’ voice, and speaking softly.

“Very well, Master Quai, there is some sense in your request, for once. Let us talk of my mistakes. An expansive subject indeed. Where to start?”

“At the beginning?” ventured his apprentice. “Where else should a man ever start?”

The Magus gave a sour grunt. “Huh. Long ago, then, in the Old Time.” He paused for a moment and stared into the flames, the light shifting over his hollow face. “I was Juvens’ first apprentice. But soon after starting my education, my master took a second. A boy from the South. His name was Khalul.” Ferro looked up suddenly, frowning from the shadows. “From the beginning, the two of us could never agree. We both were far too proud, and jealous of each other’s talents, and envious of any mark of favour the other earned from our master. Our rivalry persisted, even as the years passed and Juvens took more apprentices, twelve in all. In the beginning, it drove us to be better pupils: more diligent, more devoted. But after the horror of the war with Glustrod, many things were changed.”

Logen gathered up the bowls and started spooning steaming slop out into them, making sure to keep one ear on Bayaz’ talk. “Our rivalry became a feud, and our feud became a hatred. We fought, with words, then with hands, then with magic. Perhaps, left to ourselves, we would have killed each other. Perhaps the world would be a happier place if we had, but Juvens interposed. He sent me to the far north, and Khalul to the south, to two of the great libraries he had built long years before. He sent us there to study, separately and alone, until our tempers cooled. He thought the high mountains, and the wide sea, and the whole breadth of the Circle of the World would put an end to our feud, but he misjudged us. Rather we each raged in our exile, and blamed the other for it, and plotted our petty revenges.”

Logen shared out the food, such as it was, while Bayaz glared at Quai from under his heavy brows. “If I had only had the good sense to listen to my master then, but I was young, and headstrong, and full of pride. I burned to make myself more powerful than Khalul. I decided, fool that I was, that if Juvens would not teach me… I had to find another master.”

“Slop again, eh, pink?” grunted Ferro as she pulled her bowl from Logen’s hand.

“No need to thank me.” He tossed her a spoon and she snatched it out of the air. Logen handed the First of the Magi his bowl. “Another master? What other master could you find?”

“Only one,” murmured Bayaz. “Kanedias. The Master Maker.” He turned his spoon over and over thoughtfully in his hand. “I went to his House, and I knelt before him, and I begged to learn at his feet. He refused me, of course, as he refused everyone… at first. But I was stubborn, and in time he relented, and agreed to teach me.”

“And so you lived in the House of the Maker,” murmured Quai. Logen shivered as he hunched down over his own bowl. His one brief visit to the place still gave him nightmares.

“I did,” said Bayaz, “and I learned its ways. My skill in High Art made me useful to my new master. But Kanedias was far more jealous of his secrets than ever Juvens had been, and he worked me as hard as a slave at his forges, and taught me only such scraps as I needed to serve him. I grew bitter, and when the Maker left to seek out materials for his works, my curiosity, and my ambition, and my thirst for knowledge, drove me to stray into parts of his House where he had forbidden me to tread. And there I found his best-guarded secret.” He paused.

“What was it?” prompted Longfoot, spoon frozen halfway to his mouth.

“His daughter.”

“Tolomei,” whispered Quai, in a hiss barely audible.

Bayaz nodded, and one corner of his mouth curled upwards, as though he remembered something good. “She was unlike any other. She had never left the Maker’s House, had never spoken to anyone besides her father. She helped him with certain tasks, I learned. She handled… certain materials… that only the Maker’s own blood could touch. That, I believe, is why he fathered her in the first place. She was beautiful beyond compare.” Bayaz’ face twitched, and he looked down at the ground with a sour smile. “Or so she seems to me, in memory.”

“That was good,” said Luthar, licking his fingers and setting down his empty bowl. He’d become a great deal less picky with his food lately. Logen reckoned a few weeks of not being able to chew was sure to do that to a man. “There any more?” he asked hopefully.