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

Savine twitched. ‘You don’t have to call me that.’

‘What should I call you? Savine?’

Savine flinched. ‘Best for both of us if you don’t call me that, either.’

May lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Lady Glokta, then?’

Savine grimaced. ‘Best not to even think the name.’ There was a long silence while they looked at each other. Next door, someone had started singing. Always happy songs, because there was misery enough here without singing up more. ‘Might I ask … whether you’re thinking of telling anyone?’

May sat back. ‘My father thinks you’re just some waif got lost. My mother guesses you’re somebody, but she’d never guess who. Best we keep it that way. If news got out …’ She left that hanging. It was nicely judged. There really was no need to say more. Savine remembered the crowd of men in her mill, all looking at her. The mob. The hate in their faces.

She carefully licked her lips. ‘I would … appreciate your discretion. It would put me … very much in your debt.’

‘Oh, I’m counting on it.’

Savine turned up the hem of her dress, heartbeat thud, thud, thudding in her ears, and dug down inside the fraying seam with a finger, hooking out the earrings she had been wearing the day of the uprising. First one, then the other, the unfamiliar gleam of gold in the shadows.

‘Take these.’ Her voice was far too eager for a negotiator of her experience. ‘They’re gold with—’

‘Don’t think they’d go with my ensemble.’ May’s eyes flicked down to her own threadbare dress, then back up to Savine. ‘You keep ’em.’

Silence stretched out. Clearly May had planned this. Waited for her moment and already set her price.

‘What is it you want?’ asked Savine.

‘I want my family taken care of. When this is over, there’ll be hell to pay.’

Savine closed her hand around the earrings and let it drop. ‘I expect so.’

‘I want no trouble with the Inquisition. A full pardon for my father. I want you to find somewhere for us to live, good jobs for my parents. That’s all I want. For you to keep us safe. The way we’ve kept you safe.’ May held her eye for a long time. Trying to judge whether she could be trusted. Just as Savine would have, in her worn-out shoes. ‘Can you do that?’

A refreshing change, to go into a negotiation holding none of the cards. ‘I think that is the very least I could do,’ said Savine.

May spat in her palm and offered it out. The room was so small, she barely had to lean forward. ‘Deal, then?’

‘Deal.’

And they shook.

The New Monument

‘Do you know how many peasant labourers died building King Casamir’s roads?’ asked Risinau.

He shaded his eyes against the angry sun to look up at the monument that dominated Casamir’s Square. Or its remains, anyway. All that was left on the eight-stride-high pedestal, cobwebbed with wobbly scaffolding, were a pair of enormous boots sheared off at the calf. Aropella’s famous statue of the legendary king himself, who’d defeated the Northmen and added Angland to the Union, lay in scarred chunks on the cobbles, daubed with messy slogans. A gleeful urchin was trying to prise His Majesty’s nose off with a crowbar.

Vick only broke a silence when she knew she could improve on it. Risinau was the sort of man who’d soon answer his own questions.

‘Thousands! Buried in the loam of Midderland in unmarked pits beside the roadways. And yet Casamir is remembered as a hero. A great king. And all those marvellous roads. What a gift to posterity.’ Risinau gave a snort of contempt. ‘How often have I walked through this square and gazed up at this paean to a tyrant, this symbol of oppression?’

‘No doubt it’s a stain on the Union’s past.’ Risinau turned somewhat reluctantly to Malmer, who stood behind them with Gunnar Broad looming at his shoulder. ‘But it’s the present that’s worrying me.’

Most of the Breakers still had the fervour of true believers, or at least pretended to, but Broad pushed his lenses up and frowned at the ruined monument as if he was harbouring some doubts. What happened when the rest began to doubt was anyone’s guess. Risinau didn’t seem worried, though. He was fixed on higher things.

‘And only look at what we have achieved today, brothers!’ He clapped Malmer and Broad on their shoulders as if he’d fold them in a great hug. ‘We have cast Casamir down! In his place we shall raise a new monument to the workers who died for his vainglory!’

Vick wondered how many workers would be dying for Risinau’s vainglory. No small number was her guess. Casting down a king two centuries dead was one thing. The one currently on the throne might raise stiffer objections. She was starting to think the ex-Superior was at least half-mad. But then sanity was a rare commodity in Valbeck lately, and didn’t look to be coming back into fashion any time soon.

Practicals were always loitering around Risinau like the dogs around the city’s baking rubbish. They’d put aside the black and taken off the masks, but a sharp eye could still pick out the telltale tan marks around the mouth. They were swarming in the streets near the House of Questions, optimistically renamed the House of Liberty, hunting for anyone disloyal. Or perhaps for anyone loyal. Loyalty had become quite the fluid concept.

The uprising had changed some things, but others seemed wearily familiar. The workers were still working, the Practicals were still watching, the big hats might have moved around, but the men wearing them were still lecturing everyone else on the way things should be while doing none of the work themselves.

Some Great Change.

‘Ever since its founding by that charlatan Bayaz, the Union was always built on the backs of the common folk,’ Risinau was spouting. ‘The coming of the machines, the ever-swelling avarice of investors, the raising up of money as our god and the banks its temples, these are only the latest, bleakest appendices to our sorry history. We must dig new theoretical foundations for the nation, my friends!’

Malmer made another effort at hauling him down to earth. ‘Honestly, I’m more worried over feeding folk. One of the big granaries got burned that first day. Another’s empty. And this heat’s not helping. Few o’ the pumps in the old town are already running dry. The water from some of the others I wouldn’t give to a dog—’

‘The mind needs nourishment, too, brother.’ Risinau waved away a fly, the only things prospering in the stifling city, then grinned at Vick. ‘No doubt Sibalt told you that.’

If Sibalt had told her that, she’d likely have broken his nose. It was the sort of shit only someone who’s never starved could serve up.

‘He was a fine man.’ Risinau struck his fist against his heart. ‘I miss him as one might miss a part of oneself. I think … that must be why I so enjoy conversing with you, sister. It is as close as I can come, now, to talking to him.’

Vick rarely allowed herself the luxury of not liking people. No more often than the luxury of liking them. Either one could get you killed. But she was starting to truly despise Risinau. He was vain as a peacock, selfish as a toddler, and for all his high-flown language, she was starting to suspect he was a fool. Truly clever things are said with short words. Long ones are used to hide stupidity. She could see no way this fat dreamer could have organised this uprising alone. Someone a great deal more formidable had done the heavy lifting. And Vick wanted very much to know who. So she nodded along to his nonsense as though she’d never heard such profound revelations.

‘I arrested him for organising here,’ said Risinau, gazing into the distance. ‘Twenty years ago, just after I joined the Inquisition, and the foundations of the first mills were being laid in Valbeck. We both were young men, then. Idealistic men. I arrested him, but in the end, I could only agree with him. That the workers would be ground down.’ Risinau gave a heavy sigh, the plump hand on his plump gut rising and falling with his breath. ‘I released him. To be my informant, I thought. I told myself that I had turned him, but the truth was … he turned me. We turned each other, maybe. Just the two of us, talking late into the night about the blows we would strike for the common man! Just the two of us … and the Weaver.’