Joe Abercrombie - Last Argument of Kings

Logen took a long breath, and he let Shivers walk away. “Furious stuck around for us. Wasn’t for him we’d never have been done with Bethod. We owe him. It’s just this one last fight.”

“You ever noticed how one fight has a habit of leading on to another? Seems like there’s always one fight more.”

“Uh,” said Grim.

“Not this time. This is the last, then we’re done.”

“That so? And what happens then?”

“Back to the North, I guess.” Logen shrugged his shoulders. “Peace, isn’t it?”

“Peace?” grunted the Dogman. “Just what is that, anyway? What do you do with it?”

“I reckon… well… we’ll make things grow, or something.”

“Make things grow? By all the fucking dead! What do you, or I, or any one of us know about making things grow? What else have we done, all our lives, but kill?”

Logen wriggled his shoulders, uncomfortable. “Got to keep some hope. A man can learn, can’t he?”

“Can he? The more you kill, the better you get at it. And the better you get at killing, the less use you are for anything else. Seems to me we’ve lived this long ’cause when it comes to killing we’re the very best there is.”

“You’re in a black mood, Dogman.”

“I been in a black mood for years. What worries me is that you ain’t. Hope don’t much suit the likes of us, Logen. Answer me this. You ever touched a thing that wasn’t hurt by it? What have you ever had, that didn’t turn to dirt?”

Logen thought about that. His wife and his children, his father and his people, all back to the mud. Forley, Threetrees and Tul. All good folk, and all dead, some of them by Logen’s own hand, some of them by his neglect, and his pride, and his foolishness. He could see their faces, now, in his thoughts, and they didn’t look happy. The dead don’t often. And that was without looking to the dark and sullen crew lurking behind. A crowd of ghosts. A hacked and bloody army. All the folk he’d chosen to kill. Shama Heartless, his guts hanging out of his split stomach. Blacktoe, with his crushed legs and his burned hands. That Finnius bastard, one foot cut off and his chest slashed open. Bethod, even, right at the front with his skull pounded to mush, his frowning face twisted sideways, Crummock’s dead boy peering from around his elbow. A sea of murder. Logen squeezed his eyes shut then prised them wide open, but the faces still lingered at the edge of his mind. There was nothing he could say.

“Thought so.” Dogman turned away from him, wet hair dripping round his face. “You have to be realistic, ain’t you always told me? You have to be that.” He strode off up the road, under the cold stars. Grim lingered next to Logen for a moment, then he shrugged his damp shoulders and followed the Dogman, taking his torch with him.

“A man can change,” whispered Logen, not sure whether he was talking to the Dogman, or to himself, or to those corpse-pale faces waiting in the darkness. Men clattered down the track all round him, and yet he stood alone. “A man can change.”

A trace of autumn fog had slunk off the restless sea as the sun went down over crippled Adua, turning the chill night ghostly. A hundred strides distant the houses were indistinct. Two hundred and they were spectral, the few lights in the windows floating wraiths, hazy through the gloom. Good weather for bad work, and we have much of that ahead of us.

No distant explosions had rattled the still darkness so far. The Gurkish catapults had fallen silent. At least for the moment, and why not? The city almost belongs to them, and why burn your own city? Here, on the eastern side of Adua, far from the fighting, all seemed timelessly calm. Almost as if the Gurkish had never come. So when a vague clattering filtered through the gloom, as of the boots of a body of well-armed men, Glokta could not help a pang of nervousness, and pressed himself into the deeper shadows against the hedge by the road. Faint, bobbing lights filtered through the murk. Then the outline of a man, one hand resting casually on the pommel of a sword, walking with a loose, strutting slouch that bespoke extreme over-confidence. Something tall appeared to stick from his head, waving with his movements.

Glokta peered into the murk. “Cosca?”

“The very same!” laughed the Styrian. He was affecting a fine leather cap with a ludicrously tall plume, and he flicked at it with a finger. “I bought a new hat. Or should I say you bought me one, eh, Superior?”

“So I see.” Glokta glared at the long feather, the flamboyant golden basketwork on the hilt of Cosca’s sword. “I thought we said inconspicuous.”

“In… con… spicuous?” The Styrian frowned, then shrugged his shoulders. “Ah, so that was the word. I remember something was said, and I remember I didn’t understand it.” He winced, and scratched at his crotch with one hand. “I think I picked up some passengers from one of those women at the tavern. Little bastards don’t half give a man an itch.” Huh. The women are paid to go there. One might have thought the lice would have better taste.

A shadowy crowd began to form out of the darkness behind Cosca, a few carrying hooded lanterns. A dozen shaggy outlines, then a dozen more, menace floating silently from each one of them like the stink floating from a turd. “Are these your men?”

The nearest sported perhaps the worst facial boils that Glokta had ever seen. The man beside him had only one hand, the other having been replaced with a savage-looking hook. A huge fat fellow came next, his pale neck blue with a confusion of badly drawn tattoos. A man almost dwarfish, with a face like a rat and only one eye accompanied him. He had not bothered with a patch, and the socket yawned open under his greasy hair. The list of villainy went on. Two dozen, perhaps, all told, of the most savage-looking criminals Glokta had ever laid eyes on. And I’ve laid eyes on a few in my time. Strangers to bathwater, certainly. Not a one of them looks like he wouldn’t sell his sister for a mark. “They appear somewhat unreliable,” he murmured.

“Unreliable? Nonsense, Superior! Out of luck is all, and we both know how that goes, no? Why, there’s not a man of them I wouldn’t trust my mother to.”

“Are you sure?”

“She’s been dead these twenty years. What harm could they do her now?” Cosca flung his arm round Glokta’s twisted shoulders and drew him close, causing a painful twinge to jab at his hips. “I’m afraid that pickings are slim.” His warm breath smelled strongly of spirits and corruption. “Every man not desperate fled the city the moment the Gurkish arrived. But who cares, eh? I hired them for their guts and their sinews, not their looks. Desperate men are the kind I like! We can understand them, no, you and I? Some jobs call for desperate men only, eh, Superior?”

Glokta frowned briefly over that collection of gaunt, of bloated, of scarred and ruined faces. How could it possibly be that promising Colonel Glokta, dashing commander of the King’s Own first regiment, came to be in charge of such a rabble? He gave a long sigh. But it is a little late now to be finding fine-looking mercenaries, and I suppose these will fill a pit as well as better. “Very well. Wait here.”

Glokta looked up at the dark house as he swung the gate open with his free hand and hobbled through. A chink of light peeped out from between the heavy hangings in the front window. He rapped at the door with the handle of his cane. A pause, then the sound of reluctant footsteps shuffling up the hall.

“Who is it?”

“Me. Glokta.”

Bolts drew back and light spilled out into the chill. Ardee’s face appeared, lean-looking, grey round the eyes and pink round the nose. Like a dying cat.