Джо Аберкромби - A Little Hatred - Book One (The Age of Madness)

‘That,’ said Leo, ‘was Rikke.’

‘The Dogman’s missing daughter?’

‘We used to be close when I was in Uffrith. She’s … grown.’

‘In all the right places,’ said Antaup. ‘Those eyes, though.’

‘Don’t they say she can see the future?’ asked Jurand, looking less than convinced.

Barniva’s whisper was full of laughter in Leo’s ear. ‘I’ve a suspicion she sees your cock in it.’

Jurand turned away, shaking his head. ‘For pity’s sake …’ He was a great friend, and damned clever, but he could be a hell of a prude.

‘Careful.’ Leo threw his arm around Barniva’s neck and pulled him into a headlock. ‘I might have to make you eat the hillside next.’

‘Well, if you’d rather wrestle …’ Antaup licked his finger and thumb and gave that loose curl at the front of his hair a little tweak. ‘It’d be a shame to leave such a promising field unploughed …’

It was then Leo made up his mind that he was interested. Antaup knew all about women. If he was impressed, everyone would be.

‘Keep your plough to yourself.’ He caught Antaup with his free arm and dragged him into the good-natured tussle, giving Rikke’s backside the same sort of hungry grin his friends were giving it. ‘And stay off my land.’

Questions

She thought Tallow was in the room on her left. She’d recognised his voice burbling through the wall, and even if she couldn’t hear the words, she could hear the fear. Grise was on her right. Vick had heard her screaming insults. Then just screaming. No questions yet, though. Softening her up. Vick wondered how soft she was, now.

Strange how quick you lose track of time when you can’t see the sky. Just the windowless white room, too brightly lit, and the table with two chairs and three bloodstains, and the door. Was it hours since they were caught, or days? She might’ve dozed a while. Jerked awake with the sweat cold on her bare skin to hear someone begging in the corridor outside. But the door had stayed closed. They’d stripped her, and chained her to the chair, and left her there, gradually aching more and more to piss.

She was wondering whether she should just piss where she sat when the door opened.

A man came in. Or was brought in. He sat in a strange chair on wheels, pushed by a Practical of monstrous size. He was silver-haired, his skin almost as pale as his spotless white coat and deeply lined, as if stretched too tight over the bones. His face was twisted, left eye twitchily narrowed. On his little finger he wore a ring of office with a great purple stone, but even without it there was no mistaking him.

Old Sticks. The Cripple. The King’s Skinner. The axle around which the Closed Council turned. His Eminence, Arch Lector Glokta.

‘I like your chair,’ said Vick as it squeaked to a halt on the other side of the table.

The Arch Lector raised one brow. ‘I don’t. But walking pains me more every year and my daughter tells me there is no nobility in suffering. She prevailed upon her friend Master Curnsbick to make it for me.’

‘The great machinist himself?’

‘I hear he is a genius.’ Glokta glanced up at the vast Practical looming over him, the chair’s handles lost in his immensity of fist. ‘Now a useless man can render a useful man useless wheeling him around. There’s progress, eh? Remove her restraints, please.’

‘Your Eminence?’ came muffled from behind the Practical’s mask.

‘Come, come, we are not animals.’

The Practical took a little wedge from his pocket, knelt and slipped it under one of the chair’s wheels with surprising daintiness. Then he lumbered around the table, manacles digging into Vick’s skin as he unlocked them. Her wrists were chafed raw, but she made sure not to rub them. Made sure not to wince or flinch or stretch or groan. Not even when she put her hands on the table and saw Sibalt’s blood still crusted under the nails. Show hurt, you’re asking to be hurt. She’d learned that lesson in the camps. Learned it hard.

Arch Lector Glokta watched her, the trace of a smile on his twisted face, as though he guessed her every thought. ‘And the clothes, please.’

The Practical unhappily placed a neatly folded shirt and pair of trousers on the table, and twitched one corner of the fabric like a fussy valet.

‘You can leave us, Dole.’

‘Your Eminence?’ The Practical’s voice went squeaky with dismay.

‘I have better things to do than repeat myself.’

The Practical gave Vick one last frown, backed to the door, stooped beneath the lintel and pulled it shut. The latch dropped with a final-sounding click , leaving her alone in that bare, white room with the most feared man in the Union.

‘So.’ He showed the yawning gap in his front teeth as he smiled. ‘It seems congratulations are in order again, Inquisitor Teufel. Ever so neatly done. I knew my confidence in you was not misplaced.’

‘Thank you, Your Eminence.’

‘Shall I turn my back while you dress?’ He squinted down at the wheels of his chair. ‘I’m afraid it can take a while. Nowhere near so nimble as in my youth. I won the Contest without conceding a touch, you know—’

She made her own chair squeal as she stood, ignoring the ache in her stiff hip. ‘Don’t worry.’ And she shook the shirt out and started pulling it on.

You strip a prisoner to make them feel vulnerable. Make them feel they’ve nowhere they can hide a secret. But it only works if you let it. Vick made sure she dressed just the way she would have if she was alone. When you grow up in the camps, sleeping beside strangers, sharing their warmth, their stink, their lice, hosed down in a cringing pack by the guards when the sickness comes through, modesty is a luxury you soon learn to live without.

‘I can only apologise that it took me so long to reach you,’ said His Eminence, as unmoved by her nakedness as she was. ‘The government is in uproar over this fighting in the North. Did we get them all?’

‘All except Sibalt. He …’ Vick kept her face carefully expressionless as she thought of him ramming the blade into his neck. ‘He killed himself rather than be captured.’

‘Unfortunate. I know the two of you had become … involved.’

The Arch Lector found out everything, of course. But it was as if his saying it, his knowing it, made it real. The feeling took her by surprise. She had to stop buttoning her shirt, look at the floor with her teeth gritted, stay silent in case her voice gave her away. Just for a moment. Then she carried on fastening the buttons with her blood-crusted fingers, mask back on. ‘Is that a problem, Your Eminence?’

‘Not for me. We all yearn for a simple world, but people are imperfect, unpredictable, contradictory beasts with sympathies, and needs, and feelings . Even people like us.’

‘Feelings didn’t come in to it,’ said Vick, pulling on the trousers.

She had a sense he saw through her. ‘If they did not, you have demonstrated your commitment. If they did, you have gone one better and demonstrated your loyalty.’

‘I know what I owe you. I don’t forget.’

‘I try never to blame a person for what they think. Only for what they do. And you have done all I could have asked.’

Vick sat back in the chair, facing him. ‘Sibalt was the leader. I doubt any of the others know much.’

‘We will soon see.’

Vick looked him in his eyes. Those deep-set, fever-bright eyes. ‘They’re not bad people. They just want a little more.’

‘I thought feelings did not come into it?’ The Arch Lector’s left eye had started to weep, and he pulled out a white handkerchief and gently dabbed it. ‘You grew up in the camps, Inquisitor Teufel.’