The Collected Joe Abercrombie (143 page)

The tip of his stick cracked against the door. No answer.
Damn it.
Glokta’s back was hurting like hell and he needed to sit down. He rapped again with his cane, harder this time. The hinges creaked, the door swung open a crack.
Unlocked
. He frowned, pushed it all the way. The door frame was split inside, the lock shattered.
Broken open.
He limped across the threshold, into the hall. Empty and frosty cold. Not a stick of furniture anywhere.
Almost as if she moved out. But why?
Glokta’s eyelid gave a twitch. He had scarcely once thought about Ardee his whole time in the South.
Other matters seemed so much more pressing. My one friend gave me this one task. If anything has happened to her . . .

Glokta pointed to the stairs, and Vitari nodded and crept up them silently, bending and sliding a glinting knife out from her boot. He pointed down the hall and Frost padded off deeper into the house, pressed up into the shadows by the wall. The living room door stood ajar, and Glokta shuffled to it and pushed it open.

Ardee was sitting in the window with her back to him: white dress, dark hair, just as he remembered her. He saw her head move slightly as the door’s hinges creaked.
Alive, then.
But the room was strangely altered. Aside from the one chair she sat in, it was entirely empty. Bare whitewashed walls, bare wooden boards, windows without curtains.

‘There’s nothing fucking left!’ she barked, voice cracked and throaty.

Clearly.
Glokta frowned, and stepped through the door into the room.

‘Nothing left, I said!’ She stood up, still with her back to him. ‘Or did you decide you’d take the chair after all?’ She spun round, grabbing hold of the back, lifted it over her head and flung it at him with a shriek. It crashed into the wall beside the door, sending fragments of wood and plaster flying. One leg whizzed past Glokta’s face and clattered into the corner, the rest tumbled to the floor in a mass of dust and splintered sticks.

‘Most kind,’ murmured Glokta, ‘but I prefer to stand.’

‘You!’ He could see her eyes wide with surprise through her tangled hair. There was a gauntness and a paleness to her face that he did not remember. Her dress was rumpled, and far too thin for the chilly room. She tried to smooth it with shivering hands, plucked ineffectually at her greasy hair. She gave a snort of laughter. ‘I’m afraid I’m not really prepared for visitors.’

Glokta heard Frost thumping down the hall, saw him looming up at the doorway, fists clenched. He held up a finger. ‘It’s alright. Wait outside.’ The albino faded back into the shadows, and Glokta hobbled across the creaking boards into the empty sitting room. ‘What happened?’

Ardee’s mouth twisted. ‘It seems my father was not nearly so well off as everyone imagined. He had debts. Soon after my brother left for Angland, they came to collect.’

‘Who came?’

‘A man called Fallow. He took all the money I had, but it wasn’t enough. They took the plate, my mother’s jewels, such as they were. They gave me six weeks to find the rest. I let my maid go. I sold everything I could, but they wanted more. Then they came again. Three days ago. They took everything. Fallow said I was lucky he was leaving me the dress I was wearing.’

‘I see.’

She took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Since then, I have been sitting here, and thinking on how a friendless young woman can come by some money.’ She fixed him with her eye. ‘I have thought of only one way. I daresay, if I had the courage, I would have done it already.’

Glokta sucked at his gums. ‘Lucky for us both that you’re a coward, then.’ He shrugged one shoulder out of his coat, then had to wriggle and flail to get his arm out. Once he finally did, he had to fumble his cane across into his other hand so he could finally throw it off.
Damn it. I can’t even make a generous gesture gracefully
. Finally he held it out to her, tottering slightly on his weak leg.

‘You sure you don’t need it more than me?’

‘Take it. At least then I won’t have to get the bloody thing back on.’

That brought half a smile from her. ‘Thank you,’ she muttered as she pulled it round her shoulders. ‘I tried to find you, but I didn’t know . . . where you were . . .’

‘I am sorry for that, but I am here now. You need not worry about anything. You will have to come and stay with me tonight. My quarters are not spacious, but we’ll find a way.’
There will be plenty of room once I am face down in the docks, after all.

‘What about after that?’

‘After that you will come here. Tomorrow this house will be just as it was.’

She stared at him. ‘How?’

‘Oh, I will see to it. First of all we get you in the warm.’
Superior Glokta, friend to the friendless.

She closed her eyes as he spoke, and he heard breath snorting fast through her nose. She swayed slightly, as if she hardly had the strength to stand any longer.
Strange how, as long as the hardship lasts, we can stand it. As soon as the crisis is over, the strength all leeches away in an instant.
Glokta reached out, almost touched her shoulder to steady her, but at the last moment her eyes flickered open, and she straightened up again, and he pulled his hand away.

Superior Glokta, rescuer of young women in distress
. He guided her into the hallway and towards the broken front door. ‘If you could give me one moment with my Practicals.’

‘Of course.’ Ardee looked up at him, big, dark eyes rimmed with worried pink. ‘And thank you. Whatever they say, you’re a good man.’

Glokta had to stifle a sudden urge to giggle.
A good man? I doubt that Salem Rews would agree. Or Gofred Hornlach, or Magister Kault, or Korsten dan Vurms, General Vissbruck, Ambassador Islik, Inquisitor Harker, or any of a hundred others scattered through the penal colonies of Angland or squatting in Dagoska, waiting to die. And yet Ardee West thinks me a good man.
A strange feeling, and not an unpleasant one.
It feels almost like being human again. What a shame that it comes so late in the day.

He beckoned to Frost as Ardee shuffled out in his black coat. ‘I have a task for you, my old friend. One last task.’ Glokta slapped his hand down on the albino’s heavy shoulder and squeezed it. ‘Do you know a moneylender called Fallow?’

Frost nodded slowly.

‘Find him and hurt him. Bring him here and make him understand who he has offended. Everything must be restored, better than it was, tell him that. Give him one day. One day, and then you find him, wherever he is, and you start cutting. You hear me? Do me that one favour.’

Frost nodded again, his pink eyes glinting in the dim hallway.

‘Sult will be expecting us,’ murmured Vitari, peering down at them from the stairs, arms crossed, gloved hands hanging limp over the rail.

‘Of course he will.’ Glokta winced as he hobbled to the open door.
And we wouldn’t want to keep his Eminence waiting.

Click, tap, pain, that was the rhythm of Glokta’s walking. The confident click of his right heel, the tap of his cane on the echoing tiles of the hallway, then the long scrape of his left foot with the familiar pain in the knee, arse and back. Click, tap, pain.

He had walked from the docks to Ardee’s house, to the Agriont, to the House of Questions, and all the way up here.
Limped. On my own. Without help.
Now every step was agony. He grimaced with each movement. He grunted and sweated and cursed.
But I’m damned if I’m slowing down.

‘You don’t like to make things easy, do you?’ muttered Vitari.

‘Why should they be?’ he snapped. ‘You can console yourself with the thought that this conversation will most likely be our last.’

‘Then why even come? Why not run?’

Glokta snorted. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, I am an exceptionally poor runner. That and I’m curious.’
Curious to know why his Eminence didn’t leave me there to rot along with all the rest.

‘Your curiosity might be the death of you.’

‘If the Arch Lector wants me dead, limping the other way will do me little good. I’d rather take it standing up.’ He winced at a sudden spasm through his leg. ‘Or maybe sitting down. Either way, face to face, with my eyes open.’

‘Your choice, I suppose.’

‘That’s right.’
My last one.

They came into Sult’s ante-room. He had to admit to being somewhat surprised to have come this far. He had been expecting every black-masked Practical they had passed in the building to seize hold of him. He had been expecting every black-clothed Inquisitor to point and scream for his immediate arrest.
And yet here I am again.
The heavy desk, the heavy chairs, the two towering Practicals flanking the heavy doors, were all the same.

‘I am—’

‘Superior Glokta, of course.’ The Arch Lector’s secretary bowed his head respectfully. ‘You may go in at once. His Eminence is expecting you.’ Light spilled out of the Arch Lector’s office and into the narrow chamber.

‘I’ll wait here.’ Vitari slid into one of the chairs and swung her damp boots up on an other.

‘Don’t bother waiting too long.’
My last words, perhaps?
Glokta cursed inwardly as he shuffled towards the doorway.
I really should have thought of something more memorable.
He paused for just a moment at the threshold, took a deep breath, and hobbled through.

The same airy, round room. The same dark furniture, the same dark pictures on the bright walls, the same great window with the same view of the University, and the House of the Maker beyond.
No assassins loitering under the table, no axemen waiting behind the door.
Only Sult himself, sitting at his desk with a pen in hand, the nib scratching calmly and evenly across some papers spread out before him.

‘Superior Glokta!’ Sult started up and swept gracefully across the polished floor towards him, white coat flapping. ‘I’m so glad you are safely returned!’ The Arch Lector gave every impression of being pleased to see him, and Glokta frowned. He had been prepared for almost anything but this.

Sult held out his hand, the stone on his ring of office flashing purple sparks. Glokta grimaced as he bent slowly to kiss it. ‘I serve and obey, your Eminence.’ He straightened up with an effort.
No knife in the back of the neck?
But Sult was already flowing across to the cabinet, grinning broadly.

‘Sit, please sit! You need not wait to be asked!’

Since when?
Glokta grunted his way into one of the chairs, taking only the briefest moment to check for poisoned spikes on the seat. The Arch Lector, meanwhile, had plucked open the cabinet and was rummaging inside.
Will he pull out a loaded flatbow, and shoot me through the throat?
But all that emerged were two glasses. ‘It would seem congratulations are in order,’ he threw over his shoulder.

Glokta blinked. ‘What?’

‘Congratulations. Excellent work.’ Sult grinned down at him as he slid the glasses gracefully onto the round table, eased the stopper, clinking, from the decanter.
What to say? What to say?

‘Your Eminence . . . Dagoska . . . I must be candid. It was on the point of falling when I left. Very soon now, the city will be overrun—’

‘Of course it will.’ Sult dismissed it all with a wave of his white-gloved hand. ‘There was never the slightest chance of holding it. The best I was hoping for was that you’d make the Gurkish pay! And how you did that, eh, Glokta? How you did that!’

‘Then . . . you are . . . pleased?’ He hardly dared say the word.

‘I am delighted! If I had written the tale myself, it could not have worked out better! The incompetence of the Lord Governor, the treachery of his son, it all showed how little the regular authorities can be relied upon in a crisis. Eider’s treason exposed the duplicity of the merchants, their dubious connections, their rotten morality! The Spicers have been dissolved alongside the Mercers: their trade rights are in our hands. The pair of them, consigned to the latrine of history and the power of the merchants broken! Only his Majesty’s Inquisition remained staunch in the face of the Union’s most implacable enemy. You should have seen Marovia’s face when I presented the confessions to the Open Council!’ Sult filled Glokta’s glass all the way to the top.

‘Most kind, your Eminence,’ he muttered as he took a sip from it.
Excellent wine, as always.

‘And then he got up in the Closed Council, before the King himself, mark you, and declared to everyone that you wouldn’t last a week once the Gurkish attacked!’ The Arch Lector spluttered with laughter. ‘I wish you could have been there. I’m confident he’ll do better than that, I said. Confident he’ll do better.’
A ringing endorsement indeed.