Joe Abercrombie - Last Argument of Kings

Jezal slowly stood up. “I think I will find another room to sleep in tonight. This one is altogether too cold.”

“At last.”

It can be a terrible curse for a man to get everything he ever dreamed of. If the shining prizes turn out somehow to be empty baubles, he is left without even his dreams for comfort. All the things that Jezal had thought he wanted—power, fame, the beautiful trappings of greatness—they were nothing but dust. All he wanted now was for things to be as they had been, before he got them. But there was no way back. Not ever.

He really had nothing further to say. He turned stiffly and trudged for the door.

When the fighting is over you dig, if you’re still alive. You dig graves for your dead comrades. A last mark of respect, however little you might have had for them. You dig as deep as you can be bothered, you dump them in, you cover them up, they rot away and are forgotten. That’s the way it’s always been.

There would be a lot of digging when this fight was done. A lot of digging for both sides.

Twelve days, now, since the fire started falling. Since the wrath of God began to rain on these arrogant pinks, and lay blackened waste to their proud city. Twelve days since the killing started—at the walls, and in the streets, and through the houses. For twelve days in the cold sunlight, in the spitting rain, in the choking smoke, and for twelve nights by the light of flickering fires, Ferro had been in the thick of it.

Her boots slapped against the polished tiles, leaving black marks down the immaculate hallway behind her. Ash. The two districts where the fighting was raging were covered in it, now. It had mingled with the thin rain to make a sticky paste, like black glue. The buildings that still stood, the charred skeletons of the ones that did not, the people who killed and the people who died, all coated in it. The scowling guards and the cringing servants frowned at her and the marks she left, but she had never cared a shit for their opinions, and was not about to start. They would have more ash than they knew what to do with soon. The whole place would be ash, if the Gurkish got their way.

And it looked very much as if they might. Each day and each night, for all the efforts of the rag-tag defenders, for all the dead they left among the ruins, the Emperor’s troops worked their way further into the city.

Towards the Agriont.

Yulwei was sitting in the wide chamber when she got there, shrunken into a chair in one corner, the bangles hanging from his limp arms. The calmness which had always seemed to swaddle him like an old blanket was stripped away. He looked worried, worn, eyes sunken in dark sockets. A man looking defeat in the face. A look that Ferro was getting used to seeing over the past few days.

“Ferro Maljinn, back from the front. I always said that you would kill the whole world if you could, and now you have your chance. How do you like war, Ferro?”

“Well enough.” She tossed her bow rattling onto a polished table, dragged her sword out of her belt, shrugged off her quiver. She had only a few shafts left. Most of them she had left stuck through Gurkish soldiers, out there in the blackened ruins at the edge of the city.

But Ferro could not bring herself to smile.

Killing Gurkish was like eating honey. A little only left you craving more. Too much could become sickening. Corpses had always been a poor reward for all the effort it took to make them. But there was no stopping now.

“You are hurt?”

Ferro squeezed at the filthy bandage round her arm, and watched the blood seep out into the grey cloth. There was no pain. “No,” she said.

“It is not too late, Ferro. You do not need to die here. I brought you. I can still take you away. I go where I please, and I take who I please with me. If you stop killing now, who knows? Perhaps God will still find a place in heaven for you.”

Ferro was becoming very tired of Yulwei’s preaching. She and Bayaz might not have trusted each other a finger’s breadth, but they understood each other. Yulwei understood nothing.

“ ‘Heaven’?” she sneered as she turned away from him. “Perhaps hell suits me better, did you think of that?”

She hunched up her shoulders as footsteps echoed down the hallway outside. She felt Bayaz’ anger even before the door was flung open and the old bald pink stormed into the room.

“That little bastard! After all that I have given him, how does he repay me?” Quai and Sulfur slunk through the doorway behind him like a pair of dogs creeping after their master. “He defies me before the Closed Council! He tells me to mind my business! Me! How would that cringing dunce know what is my business and what is not?”

“Trouble with King Luthar the Magnificent?” grunted Ferro.

The Magus narrowed his eyes at her. “A year ago there was no emptier head in the whole Circle of the World. Stick a crown on him and have a crowd of old liars tongue his arse for a few weeks and the little shit thinks he’s Stolicus!”

Ferro shrugged. Luthar had never lacked a high opinion of himself, king or not. “You should be more careful who you stick crowns on.”

“That’s the trouble with crowns, they have to go on someone. All you can do is drop them in a crowd and hope for the best.” Bayaz scowled over at Yulwei. “What of you brother? Have you been walking outside the walls?”

“I have.”

“And what have you seen?”

“Death. Much of that. The Emperor’s soldiers flood into the western districts of Adua, his ships choke the bay. Every day more troops come up the road from the south, and tighten the Gurkish grip on the city.”

“That much I can learn from those halfwits on the Closed Council. What of Mamun and his Hundred Words?”

“Mamun, the thrice blessed and thrice cursed? Wondrous first apprentice of great Khalul, God’s right hand? He is waiting. He and his brothers, and his sisters, they have a great tent outside the bounds of the city. They pray for victory, they listen to sweet music, they bathe in scented water, they laze naked and enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. They wait for the Gurkish soldiers to carry the walls of the city, and they eat.” He looked up at Bayaz. “They eat night and day, in open defiance of the Second Law. In brazen mockery of the solemn word of Euz. Making ready for the moment when they will come to seek you out. The moment for which Khalul made them. They think it will not be long, now. They polish their armour.”

“Do they indeed?” hissed Bayaz. “Damn them then.”

“They have damned themselves already. But that is no help to us.”

“Then we must visit the House of the Maker.” Ferro’s head jerked up. There was something about that great, stark tower that had fascinated her ever since she first arrived in Adua. She found her eyes always drawn towards its mountainous bulk, rising untouchable, high above the smoke and the fury.

“Why?” asked Yulwei. “Do you plan to seal yourself inside? Just as Kanedias did, all those years ago, when we came seeking our vengeance? Will you cower in the darkness, Bayaz? And this time, will you be the one thrown down, to break upon the bridge below?”

The First of the Magi snorted. “You know me better than that. When they come for me I will face them in the open. But there are still weapons in the darkness. A surprise or two from the Maker’s forge for our cursed friends beyond the walls.”

Yulwei looked even more worried than before. “The Divider?”

“One edge here,” whispered Quai from the corner. “One on the Other Side.”

Bayaz, as usual, ignored him. “It can cut through anything, even an Eater.”

“Will it cut through a hundred?” asked Yulwei.