Joe Abercrombie: Last Argument of Kings

The doors clattered shut and Glokta was left staring at them. His eyelid flickered, he felt wet on his cheek. Not tears of compassion, of course. Not tears of grief. I feel nothing, fear nothing, care for nothing. They cut away the parts of me that could weep in the Emperor’s prisons. This can only be salt water, and nothing more. Merely a broken reflex in a mutilated face. Farewell, brother. Farewell, my only friend. And farewell to the ghost of beautiful Sand dan Glokta, too. Nothing of him remains. All for the best, of course. A man in my position can afford no indulgences.

He took a sharp breath, and wiped his face with the back of his hand. He limped to his desk, sat, composed himself for a moment, assisted by a sudden twinge in his toeless foot. He turned his attention to his documents. Papers of confession, tasks outstanding, all the tedious business of government—

He looked up. A figure had detached itself from the shadows behind one of the high book-cases and now stepped out into the room, arms folded. The man with the burned face who had come in with the officers. In the excitement of their exit, it seemed that he had remained behind.

“Sergeant Pike, was it?” murmured Glokta, frowning.

“That’s the name I’ve taken.”

“Taken?”

The scarred face twisted into a mockery of a smile. One even more hideous than my own, if that’s possible. “Not surprising, that you shouldn’t recognise me. My first week, there was an accident in a forge. Accidents often happen, in Angland.” Angland? That voice… something about that voice… “Still nothing? Perhaps if I come closer?”

He sprang across the room without warning. Glokta was still struggling up from his seat as the man dived across the desk. They tumbled to the floor together in a cloud of flying paper, Glokta underneath, the back of his skull cracking against the stone, his breath all driven out in a long, agonised wheeze.

He felt the brush of steel against his neck. Pike’s face was no more than a few inches from his, the mottled mass of burns picked out in particularly revolting detail.

“How about now?” he hissed. “Anything seem familiar?”

Glokta felt his left eye flickering as recognition washed over him like a wave of freezing water. Changed, of course. Changed utterly and completely. And yet I know him.

“Rews,” he breathed.

“None other.” Rews bit off the words with grim satisfaction.

“You survived.” Glokta whispered it, first with amazement, then with mounting amusement. “You survived! You’re a far harder man than I gave you credit for! Far, far harder.” He started to chuckle, tears running down the side of his cheek again.

“Something funny?”

“Everything! You have to appreciate the irony. I have overcome so many powerful enemies, and it’s Salem Rews with the knife at my neck! It’s always the blade you don’t see coming that cuts you deepest, eh?”

“You’ll get no deeper cuts than this one.”

“Then cut away, my man, I am ready.” Glokta tipped his head back, stretched his neck out, pressing it up against the cold metal. “I’ve been ready for a long time.”

Rews’ fist worked around the grip of his knife. His burned face trembled, eyes narrowing to bright slits in their pink sockets. Now.

His mottled lips slid back from his teeth. The sinews in his neck stood out as he made ready to wield the blade. Do it.

Glokta’s breath hissed quickly in and out, his throat tingling with anticipation. Now, at last… now…

But Rews’ arm did not move.

“And yet you hesitate,” whispered Glokta through his empty gums. “Not out of mercy, of course, not out of weakness. They froze all that out of you, eh? In Angland? You pause because you realise, in all that time dreaming of killing me, you never thought of what would be next. What will you truly have gained, with all your endurance? With all your cunning and your effort? Will you be hunted? Will you be sent back? I can offer you so much more.”

Rews’ melted frown grew even harder. “What could you give me? After this?”

“Oh, this is nothing. I suffer twice the pain and ten times the humiliation getting up in the morning. A man like you could be very useful to me. A man… as hard as you have proved yourself to be. A man who has lost everything, including all his scruples, all his mercy, all his fear. We both have lost everything. We both have survived. I understand you, Rews, as no one else ever can.”

“Pike is my name, now.”

“Of course it is. Let me up, Pike.”

Slowly the knife slid away from his throat. The man who had been Salem Rews stood over him, frowning down. Who could ever anticipate the turns that fate can take? “Up, then.”

“Easier said than done.” Glokta dragged in a few sharp breaths, then growling with a great and painful effort he rolled over onto all fours. A heroic achievement indeed. He slowly tested his limbs, wincing as his twisted joints clicked. Nothing broken. No more broken than usual, anyway. He reached out and took the handle of his fallen cane between two fingers, dragged it towards him through the scattered papers. He felt the point of the blade pressing into his back.

“Don’t take me for a fool, Glokta. If you try anything—”

He clutched at the edge of the desk and dragged himself up. “You’ll cut my liver out and all the rest. Don’t worry. I am far too crippled to try anything worse than shit myself. I have something to show you, though. Something that I feel sure you will appreciate. If I’m wrong, well… you can slit my throat a little later.”

Glokta lurched out of the heavy door of his office, Pike sticking as close to his shoulder as a shadow, the knife kept carefully out of sight.

“Stay,” he snapped at the two Practicals in the ante-room, hobbling on past the frowning secretary at the huge desk. Out into the wide hallway running through the heart of the House of Questions and Glokta limped faster, cane clicking against the tiles. It hurt him to do it, but he held his head back, gave a cold wrinkle to his lip. Out of the corners of his eyes he saw the Clerks, the Practicals, the Inquisitors, bowing, sliding backwards, clearing away. How they fear me. More than any man in Adua, and with good reason. How things have changed. And yet, how they have stayed the same. His leg, his neck, his gums. These things were as they had always been. And always will be. Unless I am tortured again, of course.

“You look well,” Glokta tossed over his shoulder. “Aside from your hideous facial burns, of course. You lost weight.”

“Starving can do that.”

“Indeed, indeed. I lost a great deal of weight in Gurkhul. And not just from the pieces they cut out of me. This way.”

They turned through a heavy door flanked by frowning Practicals, past an open gate of iron bars. Into a long and windowless corridor, sloping steadily downwards, lit by too few lanterns and filled with slow shadows. The walls were rendered and whitewashed, though none too recently. There was a seedy feel to the place, and a smell of damp. Just as there always is. The clicking of Glokta’s cane, the hissing of his breath, the rustling of his white coat, all fell dead on the chill, wet air.

“Killing me will bring you scant satisfaction, you know.”

“We shall see.”

“I doubt it. I was hardly the one responsible for your little trip northwards. I did the work perhaps, but others gave the orders.”

“They were not my friends.”

Glokta snorted. “Please. Friends are people one pretends to like in order to make life bearable. Men like us have no need of such indulgences. It is our enemies by which we are measured.” And here are mine. Sixteen steps confronted him. That old, familiar flight. Cut from smooth stone, a little worn towards the centre.