Joe Abercrombie - Last Argument of Kings

Ah. So that’s it.

It was then that Glokta became aware of a man moving furtively towards them from the far end of the shed. A burly-looking man in a ragged coat, keeping to the shadows. He had his arm pressed tightly by his side, hand tucked up in his sleeve. Just as if he were hiding a knife up there, and not doing it very well. Better just to walk up with a smile on your face and the knife in plain view. There are a hundred reasons to carry a blade in a slaughterhouse. But there can only ever be one reason to try and hide one.

He glanced over his shoulder, wincing as his neck clicked. Another man, much like the first, was creeping up from that direction. Glokta raised his eyebrows. “Thugs? How very unoriginal.”

“Unoriginal, perhaps, but I think you will find them quite effective.”

“So I’m to be slaughtered in the slaughterhouse, eh, Morrow? Butchered at the butchers! Sand dan Glokta, breaker of hearts, winner of the Contest, hero of the Gurkish war, shat out the arses of a dozen different pigs!” He snorted with laughter and had to wipe some snot off his top lip.

“I’m so glad you enjoy the irony,” muttered Morrow, looking slightly put out.

“Oh, I do. Fed to the swine. So obvious I can honestly say it’s not what I expected.” He gave a long sigh. “But not expected and not planned for are two quite different things.”

The bowstring made no sound over the clamour of the hogs. The thug seemed at first to slip, to drop his shining knife and fall on his side for no reason. Then Glokta saw the bolt poking from his side. Not too great a surprise, of course, and yet it always seems like magic.

The hired man at the other end of the warehouse took a shocked step back, never seeing Practical Vitari slip silently over the rail of the empty pen behind him. There was a flash of metal in the darkness as she slashed the tendons at the back of his knee and brought him down, his cry quickly shut off as she pulled her chain tight round his neck.

Severard dropped down easily from the rafters off to Glokta’s left and squelched into the muck. He sauntered over, flatbow across his shoulder, kicked the fallen knife off into the darkness and looked down at the man he had shot. “I owe you five marks,” he called to Frost. “Missed his heart, damn it. Liver, maybe?”

“Lither,” grunted the albino, emerging from the shadows at the far end of the warehouse. The man struggled up to his knees, clutching at the shaft through his side, twisted face half crusted with filth. Frost lifted his stick as he passed and dealt him a crunching blow on the back of the head, putting a sharp end to his cries and knocking him face down in the muck. Vitari, meanwhile, had wrestled her man onto the floor and was kneeling on his back, dragging at the chain round his neck. His struggling grew weaker, and weaker, and stopped. A little more dead meat on the floor of the slaughterhouse.

Glokta looked back to Morrow. “How quickly things can change, eh, Harlen? One minute everyone wants to know you. The next?” He tapped sadly at his useless foot with the filthy toe of his cane. “You’re fucked. It’s a tough lesson.” I should know.

Marovia’s secretary backed away, tongue darting over his lips, one hand held out in front of him. “Now hold on—”

“Why?” Glokta pushed out his bottom lip. “Do you really think we can grow to love each other again after all this?”

“Perhaps we can come to some—”

“I’m not upset that you tried to kill me. But to make such a pathetic effort at it? We’re professionals, Morrow. It’s an insult, that you thought this might work.”

“I’m hurt,” muttered Severard.

“Wounded,” sang Vitari, chain jingling in the darkness.

“Deethly othended,” grunted Frost, herding Morrow back towards the pen.

“You should have stuck to licking Hoff’s big drunk arse. Or maybe you should have stayed on the farm, with your pigs. Tough work, perhaps, in the early morning, and so on. But it’s a living.”

“Just wait! Just wuurgh—”

Severard grabbed Morrow’s shoulder from behind, stabbed him through the side of his neck and chopped his throat out as calmly as if he was gutting a fish.

Blood showered over Glokta’s boots and he stumbled back, wincing as pain shot up his ruined leg. “Shit!” he hissed through his gums, nearly stumbling and falling on his arse in the filth, only managing to stay upright by clinging desperately to the fence beside him. “Couldn’t you just have strangled him?”

Severard shrugged. “Same result, isn’t it?” Morrow slid to his knees, eye-glasses skewed across his face, one hand clutching at his cut neck while blood bubbled out into his shirt collar.

Glokta watched the clerk tip onto his back, one leg kicking at the floor, his scraping heel leaving long streaks in the stinking muck. Alas for the pigs on the farm. They will never now see young master Morrow coming back over the hill, returned from his brave life in the glittering city, his breath smoking in the cold, cold morning…

The secretary’s convulsions grew gentler, and gentler, and he lay still. Glokta clung to the rail for a moment, watching the corpse. When was it exactly that I became… this? By small degrees, I suppose. One act presses hard upon another, on a path we have no choice but to follow, and each time there are reasons. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then one day we look up and find that we are… this.

He looked at the blood gleaming on his boot, wrinkled his nose and wiped it off on Morrow’s trouser leg. Ah, well. I would love to spend more time on philosophy, but I have officials to bribe, and noblemen to blackmail, and votes to rig, and secretaries to murder, and lovers to threaten. So many knives to juggle. And as one clatters to the filthy floor, another must go up, blade spinning razor sharp above our heads. It never gets any easier.

“Our magical friends are back in town.”

Severard lifted his mask and scratched behind it. “The Magi?”

“The First of the bastards, no less, and his bold company of heroes. Him, and his slinking apprentice, and that woman. The Navigator too. Keep an eye on them, and see if there’s a piglet we can separate from the herd. It’s high time we knew what they were about. Do you still have your charming house, by the water?”

“Of course.”

“Good. Perhaps for once we can get ahead of the game, and when his Eminence demands answers we can have them to hand.” And I can finally earn a pat on the head from my master.

“What shall we do with these?” asked Vitari, jerking her spiky head towards the corpses.

Glokta sighed. “The hogs will eat anything, apparently.”

The city was growing dark as Glokta dragged his ruined leg through the emptying streets and up towards the Agriont. The shopkeepers were closing their doors, the householders were lighting their lamps, candlelight spilling out into the dusky alleyways through chinks around the shutters. Happy families settling down to happy dinners, no doubt. Loving fathers with their lovely wives, their adorable children, their full and meaningful lives. My heartfelt congratulations.

He pressed his remaining teeth into his sore gums with the effort of maintaining his pace, sweat starting to dampen his shirt, his leg burning more and more with every lurching step. But I’m not stopping for this useless lump of dead meat. The pain crept up from ankle to knee, from knee to hip, from hip all the way up his twisted spine and into his skull. All this effort just to kill a mid-level administrator, who worked no more than a few buildings away from the House of Questions in any case. It’s a damn waste of my time, is what it is, it’s a damn—