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

Judge slowly stood, clenched fists on her scarred desk, bony shoulders hunched around her neck, stolen chains swinging. ‘Oh, I see . You’re going to march my prisoners up to our oppressors and swap ’em for a better world. Just you and your honeyed tongue.’ She stuck out her tongue and made the pointed end wiggle in a way Broad found disgusting and strangely exciting both at once. She was trouble made flesh. Everything he’d sworn he was done with. Felt he was breaking his word just looking at her. And he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

‘ Please ,’ she spat. ‘You can’t buy freedom.’ And she snatched up her hatchet and hacked at the desktop, making everyone jump. ‘You have to cut it out of them! You have to burn the bastards , then dig through their ashes for it! Look at you sorry fuckers. A crowd o’ cowards, playing at change. Someone get these fools out o’ my sight.’

‘Your honour!’ One of the motley clowns stepped towards Vick. ‘She says out you go, so—’ He was cut off in a squawk as Broad caught him by the neck and flung him across the room. He crashed into the witness box, staving in the panelling with the side of his head and going down in a tangle of limbs and splinters, his sword clattering away across the floor.

One of those long, silent moments, then. Broad heard some hard breaths behind, the scrape as men stood, the rattle as Sarlby brought his bow to his shoulder, the soft ring of steel as weapons were drawn. Broad unhooked the lenses from his ears, folded them, slid them into his coat pocket. Ready to let go. Always ready.

‘Ooooooooh.’ Judge’s throaty voice had gone all purry-soft, and even though she was just a sparkly blur now, Broad knew she was staring straight at him. ‘ You I like. You’ve got a devil in you. Takes one to know one, eh?’

Felt like Broad stood at a precipice, and all it would take was a nudge to tip him over. His voice seemed to come from a long way off. Hardly sounded like his at all. ‘I don’t want to hurt no one—’

‘’Course you fucking do! It’s written all over you. ’Cause you’re not much at anything else, are you? But at hurting people you’re the best! Don’t apologise for it! Don’t snuff your candle, bad man, let it burn ! You belong with us. You belong with me . Don’t want to hurt anyone?’ She clicked her tongue. ‘Your mouth says you don’t but your fists say you do.’

Then Broad felt a hand on his shoulder. Gentle. But firm. ‘We just want the prisoners.’ Vick’s voice. Solid as a wall. ‘Then no one gets hurt.’

That wonderful, awful moment stretched out just a little longer. Then Judge slumped back into her seat, stuck out her tongue and blew a long fart. ‘You’re one o’ those stubborn bitches, aren’t you? Once you’ve latched your teeth into something, no amount o’ beating will get you off. You know why they call me Judge?’

‘Can’t say I do,’ said Vick.

‘Used to settle the disputes among the whores, down on the docks in Keln. Judge who had the right of it. Judge what was fair. Those girls can dispute fucking anything, believe me. And in that game, well, sometimes you’ve got to find a compromise. We’re all on the same side, aren’t we, after all? All seeking a better world? A world where we’re all equal?’

‘That’s right,’ said Vick, her hand still on Broad’s prickling shoulder. ‘All equal.’

‘Even if our methods are different, meaning mine might fucking work and yours most assuredly fucking won’t.’ Judge gave a generous wave of her hand, ring-covered fingers twirling. ‘Take the prisoners. But if you think you’re getting anything for ’em from Old Sticks, I reckon you’ll learn a bitter lesson. Warden of the court?’

A man stepped forward and planted his gilded halberd on the tiles with a bang, smiling hugely, stark naked apart from a filthy sock over his fruits. ‘Your fucking honour?’

‘Conduct these worthies to the yard where the majority of our prisoners are taking their ease. And mind your foul mouth, you rogue, you, our guests have delicate sensibilities.’ She waved Vallimir away. ‘Take him down and give him into the custody of the Breakers, the lucky fucker. The fucky lucker. Ha! Case dismissed.’

No more violence today, then. Broad wasn’t sure whether it was relief or disappointment he felt as he fumbled his lenses back on to see Judge pointing down at him, lips split in a mad smile. ‘As for you , you beautiful bastard, you get tired o’ pretending, my arms are always open.’ She whipped her hat off and tossed it spinning at the Kantic smoker. ‘Don’t hog that pipe, you shit! Stoke it up and give me a suck.’

Broad stood staring at her a moment longer, pulse still thudding in his skull, then let Vick steer him after the warden’s hairy buttocks and out of the courtroom. The jeers of the jury followed him but they were half-hearted. It seemed, for now, the Burners had drunk their fill of justice.

He thought he could hear the creaking of rigging as he followed Vick down the shadowy steps behind the courtroom. The sound he’d heard when he looked up at the billowing sails on the voyage to Styria. But there was no reason for that much wood and rope behind a courthouse.

‘Bloody hell,’ whispered Sarlby as they stepped out into the light.

Across the cobbled yard, between the broken windows to either side, the Burners had set up a dozen great beams, stolen from some half-built mill, maybe. From those beams, at neat intervals, bodies hung. Might’ve been a hundred. Might’ve been more. Swaying just a little with the breeze. There were men and women. There were young and old.

All equal now, all right.

‘Bloody hell,’ whispered Sarlby again.

None of the other Breakers said a word. Vick stood staring. Broad stood staring. High ideals, like the ones that’d led him to Styria. They surely can take you to some dark places.

‘There’s a few haven’t been tried yet, down in the cells.’ The warden sniffed and adjusted his dirty sock. ‘Guess you can have them, too.’

Young Men’s Folly

‘Prince Orso isn’t coming,’ said Leo, stomping up the crumbling stairway after his mother with the Dogman behind him. ‘We have to fight .’

Her only reply was a frustrated sigh as she stepped onto the moss-speckled roof of the tower. From the top there was a fine view of the valley below the ruined holdfast, the road threading along its bottom and the high fell on the far side, crowned by red bracken. Off to the west, the road met a fast-flowing stream and crossed it by an ancient-looking bridge. There must’ve been a village beyond, the houses out of sight but the smoke from their chimneys faintly smudging the sky.

Cries drifted over as the wind picked up. Thousands of men, hundreds of horses, dozens of wagons trickling down the road between the two hills and over the bridge in a glittering ribbon. The army of Angland pulling back steadily to the south and west. Just as it had been for weeks.

‘Mustred and Clensher brought two thousand men from Angland. We won’t get any more.’ Leo stepped up next to his mother, planting his fists on the crumbling parapet. ‘Hold off now … we’ll look like cowards .’

His mother gave a dry little laugh. ‘The one advantage of being a woman in command of an army is that you don’t have to worry about looking cowardly. Everyone expects it.’

‘We’ll bloody be cowards!’

The Dogman snorted. ‘Your mother was a prisoner of Black Dow, and faced him down, and didn’t only talk her own way free but saved sixty men besides. I’ll hear her given no lessons in courage, boy. There’s a world o’ difference between being scared to fight and waiting till you can win.’