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

‘To you, Your Highness, my door stands always open.’

‘Must cause a hell of a draught!’ Arch Lector Glokta produced a false smile, displaying that hideous gap in his teeth. Orso wondered yet again how this monstrous remnant of a man could have had a hand in producing something so altogether magnificent as his daughter. ‘I wish to talk to you about the unfortunate situation in the North—’

‘I would not call it unfortunate.’

‘You wouldn’t?’

‘Scale Ironhand, his brother Black Calder and his son Stour Nightfall have invaded our Protectorate and burned the capital of our long-standing ally. That is not misfortune. That is a calculated act of war.’

‘That’s worse.’

‘Far worse.’

‘We should chastise these invaders, then!’ said Orso, whacking his fist into his open palm.

‘We should.’ Though something in the way the Arch Lector said ‘should’ suggested he didn’t think they would.

Orso paused, wondering how to frame it, but straightforward was usually best. ‘I wish to lead the expedition against them.’

‘Then I applaud your patriotic sentiments, Your Highness.’ To give Glokta his due, he showed not the slightest trace of mockery. ‘But this is a military matter. Perhaps you should raise it with Lord Marshal Brint—’

‘I did. He led me by a roundabout route to Lord Chancellor Gorodets, who led me by a roundabout route to you. I followed the power, you might say, to your door.’ And he grinned. ‘Which stands always open to me.’

The Arch Lector’s narrow left eye twitched and Orso inwardly cursed. These flourishes of cleverness never did him the slightest good. He would get further with powerful men if they thought they were indulging an idiot. They probably were, after all.

‘My father has given me leave to go,’ he went on. ‘Lord Marshal Brint can supply the officers. What I am lacking are the men. Or, more precisely, the money to pay and outfit them. Five thousand of the blighters, to be precise.’

His Eminence sat back and regarded Orso with those sunken, feverishly bright eyes. Not a pleasant gaze to endure, by any means. Orso was glad he had only to endure it here, on the ground floor of the House of Questions, and not below.

‘Do you know my daughter, Your Highness?’

A chilly breeze drifted through the Arch Lector’s stark, hard office then, making the great heaps of papers on the tables shift and crackle like restless spirits. For a moment, Orso found himself wondering how many of them were the confessions of guilty traitors. Or innocent ones. But he was decidedly pleased with the way he kept his face blank, despite the sudden surge of guilty horror, not to mention healthy fear, produced by the question. Orso might not have excelled in all the areas his mother would have liked, but at feigning ignorance he was a master. Perhaps because he had so much real ignorance to draw on.

‘Your daughter … Sarene, is it?’

‘Savine.’

‘ Savine , of course. I believe we’ve met … somewhere.’ Indeed, his tongue had met her quim and her mouth his cock not long ago and they had all got on bloody famously. He cleared his throat, aware of a swelling in his trousers by no means appropriate during a meeting with the most feared man in the Union. ‘Charming girl … as I recall.’

‘Do you know what she does?’

‘Does?’ Orso was starting to wonder if His Eminence had found out all about their little arrangement, in spite of the exhaustive precautions Savine insisted on. He was a man whose job it was to find things out, after all, and he was very, very good at his job. And that was not the sum of his job. Orso was confident the heir to the throne would not be bobbing to the surface of a canal any time soon, bloated by seawater and horribly mutilated, but … the Arch Lector would be a bad man to upset. The worst. ‘Young ladies do a lot of sewing, I understand?’

‘She is an investor,’ said Glokta.

Orso played the dunce, waving one hand so his lace cuff flapped about the fingers. ‘A kind of … merchant?’

‘A merchant in inventions. Machines. Manufactories. Better ways of doing things. She buys ideas and makes them real.’

Orso could not, in fact, have been more awed and mystified by what Savine did if she had been a magus practising High Art, but he thought it might suit the role better if he barked out a mildly contemptuous laugh. ‘How thoroughly … modern .’

‘ Thoroughly modern. In my youth, for someone to make a considerable fortune in that way, let alone a woman, would have been unthinkable. Savine may be a pioneer, but there are others following. We are entering a new age, Your Highness.’

‘We are?’

‘My daughter recently helped finance the building of a large mill near Keln.’ And His Eminence pointed with one pale, knobbly finger across the map of the Union carved into the tabletop between them, towards what looked like nothing so much as an old, stained nail mark. ‘In that mill is a machine, operated by one man and powered by a waterwheel, that can card as much wool in a day as nine men could the old way.’

‘I suppose that’s a fine thing for the wool trade?’ offered Orso, baffled.

‘It is. A fine thing for my daughter and her partners, too. But it is not so fine a thing for those other eight men, who used to card wool and are now looking for a new way to feed their families.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘And the very clever man who came up with that machine – a Gurkish refugee by the name of Masrud – has just come up with another that spins the carded wool into thread. Each one of those puts six women out of work. And they’re not happy about it.’

‘Arch Lector, fascinated though I am by your daughter’s exploits,’ and he bloody was, he was having to cross his legs at the thought of her to prevent embarrassment, ‘I’m not sure how they relate to our Northern troubles—’

‘Change, Your Highness. At a pace and of a kind that has never been seen before. An order that has stood for centuries buckles and twists. Traditional barriers, however we might try to shore them up, collapse like sandcastles before the tide. Men fear to lose what they have, covet what they do not. It is a time of chaos. Of fear.’ The Arch Lector shrugged, tentatively, as though even that gave him pain. ‘A time of opportunity, if you are as clever as my daughter, but a time of great danger, too. Not long ago, the Inquisition rooted out a scheme, devised by a group of disaffected labourers, to burn down that mill I told you of and raise the workers against your father’s government.’

‘Ah.’

‘Every day, threats are sent to the owners of manufactories. Every night, workers with soot-smeared faces cause wanton damage to machinery. In Hocksted, yesterday morning, the funeral of an agitator devolved into a full-scale riot.’

‘Ah.’

‘Below us, in the cells, are members of the group called the Breakers, apprehended only last night in the act of blowing up a foundry not two miles from where we sit. We are even now persuading them to help us uproot a conspiracy that spans the breadth of the nation.’

Orso’s eyes rolled down towards the floor. ‘That sounds … bad.’ He wasn’t sure whether he was thinking of the plot or the fate of the plotters. Perhaps both.

‘There is disloyalty everywhere. Treason everywhere. People love to say that things have never been so bad—’

Orso smiled. ‘They do, they do.’

‘But things really have never been so bad.’

Orso’s smile vanished. ‘Ah.’

‘I wish we were free to do what we thought right. I truly do.’ The Arch Lector glanced up at a huge, dark portrait on the wall. Some fearsome bald bureaucrat of the past, glowering down watchfully upon the little people. Zoller, maybe. ‘But we simply cannot risk any overseas adventures, however well intentioned, however deeply desired, however apparently necessary.’ He clasped his long, thin hands and gazed levelly at Orso, eyes glittering in skull-like sockets. ‘Put simply, the government of the Union hangs by a thread and must look first to its own security. To the legacy of the king. To the position of his heir.’