Joe Abercrombie - Last Argument of Kings

Bodies were stacked beside the wide avenue in heaps, chest-high. Sagging mounds of corpses, on and on. Hundreds upon hundreds. Too many for him to guess at the numbers. Someone had made an effort at covering them, but not that great an effort. The dead give no thanks for it, after all. Ragged sheets flapped in the breeze, weighted down with broken wood, limp hands and feet hanging out from underneath.

At this end of the road a few statues still stood. Once-proud kings and their advisers, stone faces and bodies scarred and pitted, stared sadly down at the bloody waste heaped round their feet. Enough of them for Logen to recognise that this truly was the Kingsway, and that he hadn’t somehow stumbled into the land of the dead.

A hundred strides further and there were only empty plinths, one with broken legs still attached. A strange group were clustered around them. Withered-looking. Somewhere between dead and alive. A man sat on a block of stone, staring numbly as he pulled handfuls of hair out of his head. Another was coughing into a bloody rag. A woman and a man lay side by side, gawping at nothing, faces shrivelled to little more than skulls. Her breath came crackling short and fast. His did not come at all.

Another hundred strides and it was as if Logen walked through some ruined hell. There was no sign that statues, buildings, or anything else had ever stood there. In their place were only tangled hills of strange rubbish. Broken stone, splintered wood, twisted metal, paper, glass, all crushed together and bound up with tons of dust and mud. Things stuck from the wreckage, strangely intact—a door, a chair, a carpet, a painted plate, the smiling face of a statue.

Men and women struggled everywhere among this chaos, streaked with dirt, picking at the rubbish, throwing it down to the road, trying to clear paths through it. Rescuers, workmen, thieves, who knew? Logen passed by a crackling bonfire high as a man, felt the kiss of its heat on his cheek. A big soldier in armour stained with black soot stood beside it. “You find anything in white metal?” he was roaring at the searchers, “anything at all? It goes in the fire! Flesh in white metal? Burn it! Orders of the Closed Council!”

A few strides further on, someone was on top of one of the highest mounds, straining at a great length of wood. He turned round to get a better grip. None other than Jezal dan Luthar. His clothes were torn and grubby, his face was smudged with mud. He barely looked any more like a king than Logen did.

A thickset man stood staring up, one arm in a sling. “Your Majesty, this is not safe!” he piped in an oddly girlish voice. “We really should be—”

“No! This is where I’m needed!” Jezal bent back over the beam, straining at it, veins bulging from his neck. There was no way he was going to get it shifted on his own, but still he tried. Logen stood watching him. “How long’s he been like this?”

“All night, and all day,” said the thickset man, “and no sign of stopping. Those few we’ve found alive, nearly all of them have this sickness.” He waved his good arm towards the pitiful group beside the statues. “Their hair falls out. Their nails. Their teeth. They wither. Some have died already. Others are well on the way.” He slowly shook his head. “What crime did we commit to deserve this punishment?”

“Punishment doesn’t always come to the guilty.”

“Ninefingers!” Jezal was looking down, the watery sun behind him. “There’s a strong back! Grab the end of that beam there!”

It was hard to see what good shifting a beam might do, in all of this. But great journeys start with small steps, Logen’s father had always told him. So he clambered up, wood cracking and stones sliding underneath his boots, hauled himself to the top and stood there, staring.

“By the dead.” From where he was standing, the hills of wreckage seemed to go on forever. People crawled over them, dragging frantically at the rubble, sorting carefully through it, or simply standing like him, stunned by the scale of it. A circle of utter waste, a mile across or more.

“Help me, Logen!”

“Aye. Right.” He bent down and dug his hands under one end of the great length of scarred wood. Two kings, dragging at a beam. The kings of mud.

“Pull, then!” Logen heaved, his stitches burning. Gradually he felt the wood shift. “Yes!” grunted Jezal through gritted teeth. Together they lifted it, hauled it to one side. Jezal reached down and dragged away a dry tree-branch, tore back a ripped sheet. A woman lay beneath, staring sideways. One broken arm was wrapped around a child, curly hair dark with blood.

“Alright.” Jezal wiped slowly at his mouth with the back of one dirty hand. “Alright. Well. We’ll put them with the rest of the dead.” He clambered further over the wreckage. “You! Bring that crowbar up here! Up here, and a pick, we need to clear this stone! Stack it there. We’ll need it, later. To rebuild!”

Logen put a hand on his shoulder. “Jezal, wait. Wait. You know me.”

“Of course. I like to think so.”

“Alright. Tell me something, then. Am I…” He struggled to find the right words. “Am I… an evil man?”

“You?” Jezal stared at him, confused. “You’re the best man I know.”

They were gathered under a broken tree in the park, a shadowy crowd of them. Black outlines of men, standing calm and still, red clouds and golden spread out above, around the setting sun. Logen could hear their slow voices as he walked up. Words for the dead, soft and sad. He could see the graves at their feet. Two dozen piles of fresh turned earth, set out in a circle so each man was equal. The Great Leveller, just as the hillmen say. Men put in the mud, and men saying words. Could’ve been a scene out of the old North, long ago in the time of Skarling Hoodless.

“…Harding Grim. I never saw a better man with a bow. Not ever. Can’t count the number o’ times he saved my life, and never expected thanks for it. Except maybe that I’d do the same for him. Guess I couldn’t, this time. Guess none of us could…”

The Dogman’s voice trailed off. A few heads turned to look at Logen as his footsteps crunched in the gravel. “If it ain’t the King o’ the Northmen,” someone said.

“The Bloody-Nine his self.”

“We should bow, shouldn’t we?”

They were all looking at him now. He could see their eyes gleaming in the dusk. Nothing more than shaggy outlines, hard to tell one man from another. A crowd of shadows. A crowd of ghosts, and just as unfriendly.

“You got something you want to say, Bloody-Nine?” came a voice from near the back.

“I don’t reckon,” he said. “You’re doing alright.”

“Was no reason for us to be here.” A few mumbles of agreement.

“Not our bloody fight.”

“No need for them to have died.” More mutters.

“Should be you we’re burying.”

“Aye, maybe.” Logen would have liked to weep at that. But instead he felt himself smiling. The Bloody-Nine’s smile. That grin that skulls have, with nothing inside but death. “Maybe. But you don’t get to pick who dies. Not unless you’ve got the bones to put your own hand to it. Have you? Have any of you?” Silence. “Well, then. Good for Harding Grim. Good for the rest o’ the dead, they’ll all be missed.” Logen spat onto the grass. “Shit on the rest of you.” And he turned and walked back the way he came.

Into the darkness.

So much to do.

The House of Questions still stood, and someone had to take the reins. Who else will do it? Superior Goyle? A flatbow bolt through the heart prevents him, alas. Someone had to look to the internment and questioning of the many hundreds of Gurkish prisoners, more captured every day as the army drove the invaders back to Keln. And who else will do it? Practical Vitari? Left the Union forever with her children in tow. Someone had to examine the treason of Lord Brock. To dig him up, and root out his accomplices. To make arrests, and obtain confessions. And who else is there, now? Arch Lector Sult? Oh, dear me, no.