Joe Abercrombie - Before They Are Hanged

He snorted with laughter. “Don’t you know me at all?” he blubbered, half chuckling, half sobbing, eyes watering with a sickening mixture of pain and amusement. “Superior Glokta, pleased to meet you! I don’t care a good shit what you do, and you know it. Threats? You’ll have to do a sight better than that, you ginger whore!”

Her eyes bulged with fury. Her shoulder came forwards, her elbow went back, ready to apply the greatest possible pressure. Enough to cut my neck through to my twisted spine, I don’t doubt.

Glokta felt his lips curl back in a sickly grin, wet with spit. Now.

He heard Vitari’s breath snorting behind her mask. Do it.

He felt the blade press against his neck, a chill touch, so sharp that he could hardly feel it. I’m ready.

Then she let out a long hiss, lifted the blade high and rammed it into the wood beside his head. She stood up and turned away from him. Glokta closed his eyes and breathed for a moment. Still alive. There was an odd feeling in his throat. Relief, or disappointment? Hard to tell the difference.

“Please.” It was said so softly that he thought he might have imagined it. Vitari was standing with her back to him, head bent over, fists clenched and trembling.

“What?”

“Please.” She did say it. And it hurts her to do it, you can tell.

“Please, eh? You think there’s any place here for please? Why the hell should I save you, really? You came here to spy for Sult. You’ve done nothing but get in my way ever since you got here! It’s hard to think of anyone I trust less, and I don’t trust anyone!”

She turned back to face him, reached behind her head, took hold of the straps of her mask, and pulled it off. There was a sharp tan line underneath: brown round her eyes, her forehead, her neck, white round her mouth with a pink mark across the bridge of her nose. Her face was far softer, much younger, more ordinary than he had expected. She no longer looked fearsome. She looked scared and desperate. Glokta felt suddenly, ludicrously awkward, as though he had blundered into a room and caught someone naked. He almost had to look away as she kneeled down level with him.

“Please.” Her eyes looked moist, dewy, her lip trembling as if she was on the very point of weeping. A glimpse at the secret hopes beneath the vicious shell? Or just a good act? Glokta felt his eyelid fluttering. “It’s not for myself,” she almost whispered. “Please. I’m begging you.”

He rubbed his hand thoughtfully across his neck. When he took it away there was blood on his fingertip. The faintest brown smear. A nick. A graze. Just a hair’s breadth further, and I’d be pumping blood all over the lovely carpet right now. Only a hair’s breadth. Lives turn on such chances. Why should I save her?

But he knew why. Because I don’t save many.

He turned painfully round on the box so his back was to her and sat there, kneading at the dead flesh of his left leg. He took a deep breath. “Alright,” he snapped.

“You won’t regret it.”

“I regret it already. Damn but I’m a fool for crying women! And you can carry your own damn luggage!” He looked round, raising a finger, but Vitari already had the mask back on. Her eyes were dry, and narrow, and fierce. They look like eyes that couldn’t shed a tear in a hundred years.

“Don’t worry.” She jerked on the chain round her wrist and the cross-shaped blade sprang from the lid of the box and slapped into her waiting palm. “I travel light.”

Glokta watched the flames reflected in the calm surface of the bay. Shifting fragments, red, yellow, sparkling white in the black water. Frost pulled at the oars, smoothly, evenly, his pale face half lit by the flickering fires in the city, expressionless. Severard sat behind him, hunched over, glowering out across the water. Vitari was beyond, in the prow, her head no more than a spiky outline. The blades dipped into the sea and feathered the water with barely a sound. It hardly seemed that the boat moved. Rather the dark outline of the peninsula slipped slowly away from them, into the darkness.

What have I done? Consigned a city full of people to death or slavery, for what? For the Kings honour? A drooling halfwit who can scarcely control his bowels, let alone a country. For my pride? Hah. I threw it all away long ago, along with my teeth. For Sult’s approval? My reward is like to be a rope collar and a long drop.

He could just see the darker outline of the rock against the dark night sky, the craggy form of the citadel perched on top of it. Perhaps even the slender shapes of the spires of the Great Temple. All moving off into the past.

What could I have done differently? I could have thrown in my lot with Eider and the rest. Given the city away to the Gurkish without a fight. Would that have changed anything? Glokta licked sourly at his empty gums. The Emperor would have set about his purges just the same. Sult would have sent for me, just as he has done. Little differences, hardly worth commenting on. What did Shickel say? Few indeed are those who get a choice.

A chill breeze blew and Glokta pulled his coat tight around him, folded his arms across his chest, winced as he worked his numb foot back and forward in his boot, trying to make the blood flow. The city was nothing but a dusting of pinprick lights, far away.

It is just as Eider said—all so the Arch Lector and his like can point at a map and say this dot or that is ours. His mouth twitched into a smile. And after all the efforts, all the sacrifices, all the scheming, and plotting, and killing, we could not even hold the city. All that pain, for what?

There was no reply, of course. Only the calm waves lapping against the side of the boat, the soft creaking of the rowlocks, the soothing slap, slap of the oars on the water. He wanted to feel disgust at himself. Guilt at what he had done. Pity for all those left behind to Gurkish mercy. The way other men might. The way I might have, long ago. But it was hard to feel much of anything beyond the overwhelming tiredness and the endless, nagging ache up his leg, through his back, into his neck. He winced as he sagged back on his wooden seat, searching, as always, for a less painful position. There is no need to punish myself, after all. Punishment will come soon enough.

A least he could ride now. The splints had come off that morning, and Jezal’s sore leg knocked painfully against his horse’s flank as it moved. His hand was numb and clumsy on the reins, his arm weak and aching without the dressing. His teeth still throbbed dully with every thump of the hooves on the ruined road. But at least he was out of the cart, and that was something. Small things seemed to make him very happy these days.

The others rode in a sombre, silent group, grim as mourners at a funeral, and Jezal hardly blamed them. It was a sombre sort of place. A plain of dirt. Of fissures of bare rock. Of sand and stone, empty of life. The sky was a still white nothing, heavy as pale lead, promising rain but never quite delivering. They rode clustered round the cart as though huddling for warmth, the only warm things in a hundred miles of cold desert, the only moving things in a place frozen in time, the only living things in a dead country.

The road was wide, but the stones were cracked and buckled. In places whole stretches of it had crumbled away, in others flows of mud had covered it entirely. The dead stumps of trees jutted from the bare earth to either side. Bayaz must have seen him looking at them.

“An avenue of proud oaks lined this road for twenty miles from the city gates. In summer their leaves shimmered and shook in the wind over the plain. Juvens planted them with his own hands, in the Old Time, when the Empire was young, long before even I was born.”