The Blade Itself (52 page)

“Enough riddles,” sneered Glokta. “Why not just tell me what you’re after?”

The First of the Magi, if such he was, grinned still wider. “I like you, Inquisitor, I really do. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were the only honest man left in this whole damn country. We should have a talk at some point, you and I. A talk about what I want, and about what you want.” His smile vanished. “But not today.”

And he stepped through the open door, leaving Glokta behind in the shadows.

Nobody’s Dog

“Why me?” West murmured to himself through gritted teeth, staring across the bridge towards the South Gate. That nonsense at the docks had taken him longer than expected, much longer, but then didn’t everything these days? It sometimes felt as if he was the only man in the Union seriously preparing for a war, and had to organise the entire business on his own, right down to counting the nails that would hold the horses’ shoes on. He was already late for his daily meeting with Marshal Burr, and knew there would be a hundred impossible things for him to get done today. There always were. To become involved in some pointless hold-up here at the very gate of the Agriont was all he needed.

“Why the hell must it be me?” His head was starting to hurt again. That all too familiar pulsing behind the eyes. Each day it seemed to come on earlier, and end up worse.

Because of the heat over the last few days, the guards had been permitted to come to duty without full armour. West reckoned that at least two of them were now regretting it. One was folded up on the ground near the gate, hands clasped between his legs, whimpering noisily. His sergeant stood stooped over next to him, blood running from his nose and pattering dark red drops on the stones of the bridge. The two other soldiers in the detail had their spears lowered, blades pointing towards a scrawny dark-skinned youth. Another southerner stood nearby, an old man with long grey hair, leaning against the handrail and watching the scene with an expression of profound resignation.

The youth glanced quickly over his shoulder and West felt a sting of surprise. A woman: black hair hacked off short and sticking off her head in a mess of greasy spikes. One sleeve was torn off round her shoulder and a long, sinewy brown arm stuck out, ending in a fist bunched tight around the grip of a curved knife. The blade shone, mirror bright and evilly sharp, the one and only thing about her that looked clean. There was a thin, grey scar all the way down the right side of her face, through her black eyebrow and across her scowling lips. It was her eyes, though, which truly caught West off guard: slightly slanted, narrowed with the deepest hostility and suspicion, and yellow. He had seen all kinds of Kantics in his time, while he was fighting in Gurkhul, in the war, but he never saw eyes like that before. Deep, rich, golden yellow, like…

Piss. That was the smell, as he came closer. Piss, and dirt, and a lot of old, sour sweat. He remembered that from the war alright, the stink of men who had not washed in a very long time. West fought the compulsion to wrinkle up his nose and breathe through his mouth as he approached, and the urge to circle out wide and keep his distance from that glittering blade. You have to show no fear if you’re to calm a dangerous situation, however much you might be feeling. In his experience, if you could seem to be in control, you were more than halfway to being there.

“What the hell is going on here?” he growled at the bloody-faced sergeant. He had no need at all to feign annoyance, he was getting later and angrier by the second.

“These stinking beggars wanted to come into the Agriont, sir! I tried to turn them away, of course, but they have letters!”

“Letters?”

The strange old man tapped West on the shoulder, handed over a folded sheet of paper, slightly grubby round the edges. He read it, his frown growing steadily deeper. “This is a letter of transit signed by Lord Hoff himself. They must be admitted.”

“But not armed, sir! I said they couldn’t go in armed!” The sergeant held up an odd looking bow of dark wood in one hand, and a curved sword of the Gurkish design in the other. “It was enough of a struggle getting her to give these up, but when I tried to search her… this Gurkish bitch…” The woman hissed and took a quick step forward, and the sergeant and his two guards shuffled nervously back in a tight group.

“Peace, Ferro,” sighed the old man in the Kantic tongue. “For God’s sake, peace.” The woman spat on the stones of the bridge and hissed some curse that West could not understand, weaving the blade back and forth in a way that suggested she knew how to use it, and was more than willing.

“Why me?” West mumbled under his breath. It was plain he was going nowhere until this difficulty was resolved. As if he didn’t have enough to worry about. He took a deep breath and did his best to put himself in the position of the stinking woman: a stranger, surrounded by strange-looking people speaking words she didn’t understand, brandishing spears and trying to search her. Probably she was even now thinking about how horrible West smelled. Disorientated and afraid, most likely, rather than dangerous. She did look very dangerous though, and not in the least afraid.

The old man certainly seemed the more reasonable of the two, so West turned to him first. “Are you two from Gurkhul?” he asked him in broken Kantic.

The old man turned his tired eyes on West. “No. There is more to the South than the Gurkish.”

“Kadir then? Taurish?”

“You know the South?”

“A little. I fought there, in the war.”

The old man jerked his head at the woman, watching them suspiciously with her slanted yellow eyes. “She is from a place called Muntaz.”

“I never heard of it.”

“Why would you have?” The old man shrugged his bony shoulders. “A small country, by the sea, far to the east of Shaffa, beyond the mountains. The Gurkish conquered it years ago, and its people were scattered or made slaves. Apparently she has been in a foul mood ever since.” The woman scowled over at them, keeping one eye on the soldiers.

“And you?”

“Oh, I come from much further south, beyond Kanta, beyond the desert, even beyond the Circle of the World. The land of my birth will not be on your maps, friend. Yulwei is my name.” He held out a long, black hand.

“Collem West.” The woman watched them warily as they shook hands.

“This one is called West, Ferro! He fought against the Gurkish! Will that make you trust him?” Yulwei didn’t sound very hopeful, and indeed the woman’s shoulders were still as hunched and bristling as ever, her grip on the knife no less tight. One of the soldiers chose that unfortunate moment to take a step forward, jabbing at the air with his spear, and the woman snarled and spat again, shouting more unintelligible curses.

“That’s enough!” West heard himself roaring at the guard. “Put your fucking spears up!” They blinked at him, shocked, and he fought to bring his voice back under control. “I don’t think this is a full-scale invasion, do you? Put them up!”

Reluctantly the spearpoints drifted away from the woman. West stepped firmly towards her, keeping his eyes fixed on hers with all the authority he could muster. Show no fear, he thought to himself, but his heart was thumping. He held out his open palm, almost close enough to touch her.

“The knife,” said West sharply in his bad Kantic. “Please. You will not be harmed, you have my word.”

The woman stared at him with those slanted, beady yellow eyes, then at the guards with the spears, then back to him. She took plenty of time over it. West stood there, mouth dry, head still thumping, getting later and later, sweating under his uniform in the hot sun, trying to ignore the woman’s smell. Time passed.

“God’s teeth, Ferro!” snapped the old man suddenly. “I am old! Take pity on me! I may only have a few years left! Give the man the knife, before I die!”

“Ssssss,” she hissed, curling her lip. For a dizzy, stretched-out moment the knife went up, then the hilt slapped down into West’s palm. He allowed himself a dry swallow of relief. Right up until the last moment he had been almost sure she would give him the sharp end.

“Thank you,” he said, a deal more calmly than he felt. He handed the knife to the sergeant. “Stow the weapons away and escort our guests into the Agriont, and if any harm comes to anyone, especially her, I’ll be holding you responsible, understand?” He glowered at the sergeant for a moment then stepped through the gate into the tunnel before anything else could go wrong, leaving the old man and the stinking woman behind him. His head was thumping harder even than before. Damn it he was late.

“Why the hell me?” he grumbled to himself.

“I am afraid the armouries are closed for the day,” sneered Major Vallimir, staring down his nose at West as though at a beggar whining for small change. “Our quotas are fulfilled, ahead of schedule, and we will not be lighting the forges again this week. Perhaps if you had arrived on time…” The pounding in West’s head was growing worse than ever. He forced himself to breathe slowly, and keep his voice calm and even. There was nothing to be gained by losing his temper. There was never anything to be gained by that.

“I understand, Major,” said West patiently, “but there is a war on. Many of the levies we have received are scarcely armed, and Lord Marshal Burr has asked that the forges be lit, in order to provide equipment for them.”

This was not entirely true, but since joining the Marshal’s staff West had more or less given up on telling the whole truth to anyone. That was no way to get anything done. He now employed a mixture of wheedling, bluster, and outright lies, humble entreaties and veiled threats, and had become quite expert at judging which tactic would be most effective on what man.

Unfortunately, he had yet to strike the right chord with Major Vallimir, the Master of the King’s Armouries. Somehow, their being equal in rank made matters all the more difficult: he could not quite get away with bullying the man, but could not quite bring himself to beg.

Furthermore, in terms of social standing they were anything but equals. Vallimir was old nobility, from a powerful family, and arrogant beyond belief. He made Jezal dan Luthar seem a humble, selfless type, and his total lack of experience in the field only made matters worse: he behaved doubly like an ass in order to compensate. Instructions from West, though they might come from Marshal Burr himself, were as welcome as they would have been from a reeking swineherd.

Today was no exception. “This month’s quotas are fulfilled,
Major West
,” Vallimir managed to put a sneering emphasis into the name, “and so the forges are closed. That is all.”

“And this is what you would have me tell the Lord Marshal?”

“The arming of levies is the responsibility of those lords that provide them,” he recited primly. “
I
cannot be blamed if
they
fall short on
their
obligations. It is simply not our problem,
Major West
, and you may tell
that
to the Lord Marshal.”

This was always the way of it. Back and forth: from Burr’s offices to the various commissary departments, to the commanders of companies, of battalions, of regiments, to the stores scattered around the Agriont and the city, to the armouries, the barracks, the stables, to the docks where the soldiers and their equipment would begin to embark in just a few short days, to other departments and back to where he began, with miles walked and nothing done. Each night he would drop into bed like a stone, only to start up a few hours later with it all to do again.

As commander of a battalion his trade had been to fight the enemy with steel. As a staff officer, it seemed, his role was to fight his own side with paper, more secretary than soldier. He felt like a man trying to push a huge stone up a hill. Straining and straining, getting nowhere, but unable to stop pushing in case the rock should fall and crush him. Meanwhile, arrogant bastards who were in just the same danger lazed on the slopes beside him saying, “Well, it’s not my rock.”

He understood now why, during the war in Gurkhul, there had sometimes not been enough food for the men to eat, or clothes for them to wear, or wagons to draw the supplies with, or horses to draw the wagons, or all manner of other things that were deeply necessary and easily anticipated.

West would be damned before that happened because of some oversight of his. And he would certainly be damned if he would see men die for want of a weapon to fight with. He tried yet again to calm himself, but each time his head hurt more, and his voice was cracking with the effort. “And what if we find ourselves mired in Angland with a crowd of half-clothed, unarmed peasants to provide for, what then, Major Vallimir? Whose problem will it be? Not yours, I dare say! You’ll still be here, with your cold forges for company!”

West knew as soon as he said it that he had gone too far: the man positively bristled. “How dare you, sir! Are you questioning my personal honour? My family goes back nine generations in the King’s Own!”

West rubbed his eyes, not knowing whether he wanted to laugh or cry. “I have no doubts as to your courage, I assure you, that was not my meaning at all.” He tried to put himself in Vallimir’s position. He did not really know the pressures the man was under: probably he would rather be in command of soldiers than smiths, probably… it was no use. The man was a shit, and West hated him. “This is not a question of your honour, Major, or that of your family. This is a question of our being fit for war!”

Vallimir’s eyes had turned deadly cold. “Just who do you think you’re talking to, you dirty commoner? All the influence you have you owe to Burr, and who is he but an oaf from the provinces, risen to his rank by fortune alone?” West blinked. He guessed what they said about him behind his back of course, but it was another thing to hear it to his face. “And when Burr is gone, what will become of you? Eh? Where will you be without him to hide behind? You’ve no blood, no family!” Vallimir’s lips twisted in a cold sneer. “Apart from that
sister
of yours of course, and from what I hear—”