The Collected Joe Abercrombie (47 page)

No!
Glokta forced the idea from his mind. He lifted his head and gave the old man a sneer of his own to think about.
An aging actor with a shaved head and a plausible manner. Nothing more.
‘If you are as you say, you have nothing to fear from my questions, or from your answers.’

The old man cracked a smile and the strange pressure was suddenly released. ‘Your candour at least, Inquisitor, is quite refreshing. No doubt you will do your utmost to prove your theory. I wish you luck. I, as you say, have nothing to fear. I would only ask that you find some proof of this deception before bothering us again.’

Glokta bowed stiffly. ‘I will try to do so,’ he said, and made for the door.

‘There is one more thing!’ The old man was looking towards the gaping hole in the wall. ‘Would it be possible to find some other chambers? The wind blows rather chill through these.’

‘I will look into it.’

‘Good. Perhaps somewhere with fewer steps. Damn things play hell with my knees these days.’
Indeed? There, at least, we can agree.

Glokta gave the three of them one last inspection. The bald old man stared back, his face a blank wall. The lanky youth glanced up anxiously then quickly turned away. The Northman was still frowning towards the latrine door.
Charlatans, impostors, spies. But how to prove it?
‘Good day, gentlemen.’ And he limped towards the stairs with as much dignity as he could muster.

Nobility

J
ezal scraped the last fair hairs from the side of his jaw and washed the razor off in the bowl. Then he wiped it on the cloth, closed it and placed it carefully on the table, admiring the way the sunlight glinted on the mother-of-pearl handle.

He wiped his face, and then – his favourite part of the day – gazed at himself in the looking glass. It was a good one, newly imported from Visserine, a present from his father: an oval of bright, smooth glass in a frame of lavishly-carved dark wood. A fitting surround for such a handsome man as the one gazing happily back at him. Honestly, handsome hardly did him justice.

‘You’re quite the beauty aren’t you?’ Jezal said to himself, smiling as he ran his fingers over the smooth skin of his jaw. And what a jaw it was. He had often been told it was his best feature, not that there was anything whatever wrong with the rest of him. He turned to the right, then to the left, the better to admire that magnificent chin. Not too heavy, not brutish, but not too light either, not womanly or weak. A man’s jaw, no doubt, with a slight cleft in the chin, speaking of strength and authority, but sensitive and thoughtful too. Had there ever been a jaw like it? Perhaps some king, or hero of legend, once had one almost as fine. It was a noble jaw, that much was clear. No commoner could ever have had a chin so grand.

It must have come from his mother’s side of the family, Jezal supposed. His father had rather a weak chin. His brothers too, come to think of it. You had to feel a little sorry for them, he had got all the looks in his family.

‘And most of the talent too,’ he murmured happily to himself. He turned away from the mirror with some reluctance, striding into his living room, pulling his shirt on and buttoning it up the front. He had to look his best today. The thought gave him a little shiver of nerves, starting in his stomach, creeping up his windpipe, lodging in his throat.

By now, the gates would be open. A steady flood of people would be filing into the Agriont, taking their seats on the great wooden benches in the Square of Marshals. Thousands of them. Everyone who was anyone, and plenty more who weren’t. They were already gathering: shouting, jostling, excited, waiting for . . . him. Jezal coughed and tried to push the thought from his mind. He had kept himself awake with it for half the night already.

He moved over to the table, where the breakfast tray was sitting. He picked up a sausage absently in his fingertips and took a bite off the end, chewing it without relish. He wrinkled his nose and tossed it back in the dish. He had no appetite this morning. He was just wiping his fingers on the cloth when he noticed something lying on the floor by the door, a slip of paper. He bent and picked it up, unfolded it. A single line, written in a neat, precise hand:

Meet me tonight, at the statue of
Harod the Great near the Four Corners
- A.

‘Shit,’ he murmured, disbelieving, reading the line over and over. He folded the paper shut, glancing nervously round the room. Jezal could only think of one ‘A’. He had pushed her to the back of his mind the last couple of days, he had been spending every spare moment training. This brought it all back though, and no mistake.

‘Shit!’ He opened the paper and read the line again. Meet me tonight? He could not escape a slight flush of satisfaction at that, and it slowly became a very distinct glow of pleasure. His mouth curled into a gormless grin. Secret meetings in the darkness? His skin prickled with excitement at the prospect. But secrets have a way of coming to the surface, and what if her brother found out? That thought brought on a fresh rush of nerves. He took the slip of paper in both hands, ready to tear it in half, but at the last moment he folded it instead, and slipped it into his pocket.

As Jezal made his way down the tunnel he could already hear the crowd. A strange, echoing murmur, seeming to come out of the very stones. He had heard it before, of course, as a spectator at last year’s Contest, but it hadn’t made his skin sweat and his guts turn over then. Being part of the audience is a world away from being part of the show.

He slowed for a moment, then stopped, closing his eyes and leaning against the wall, the noise of the crowd rushing in his ears, trying to breathe deep and compose himself.

‘Don’t worry, I know just how you feel.’ Jezal felt West’s consoling hand on his shoulder. ‘I nearly turned around and ran the first time, but it’ll pass as soon as the steels are drawn, believe me.’

‘Yes,’ mumbled Jezal, ‘of course.’ He doubted that West knew exactly how he felt. The man might have been through a couple of Contests before, but Jezal thought it unlikely he had been considering a surreptitious meeting with his best friend’s sister the same night. He wondered whether West would be quite so considerate if he knew the contents of the letter in Jezal’s breast pocket. It did not seem likely.

‘We’d better get moving. Wouldn’t want them to start without us.’

‘No.’ Jezal took one last deep breath, opened his eyes and blew out hard. Then he pushed himself away from the wall and strode rapidly down the tunnel. He felt a sudden surge of panic – where were his steels? He cast about him desperately, then breathed a long sigh. They were in his hand.

There was quite a crowd in the hall at the far end: trainers, seconds, friends, family members and hangers-on. You could tell who the contestants were, though; the fifteen young men with steels clutched tightly in their hands. The sense of fear was palpable, and contagious. Everywhere Jezal looked he saw pale, nervous faces, sweaty foreheads, anxious eyes darting around. It wasn’t helped by the noise of the crowd, ominously loud beyond the closed double doors at the far end of the room, swelling and subsiding like a stormy sea.

There was only one man there who didn’t seem at all bothered by the occasion, leaning against the wall on his own with one foot up on the plaster and his head tipped back, staring down his nose at the assembly through barely open eyes. Most of the contestants were lithe, stringy, athletic. He was anything but. A big, heavy man with hair shaved to dark stubble. He had a great thick neck and a doorstep of a jaw – the jaw of a commoner, Jezal rather thought, but a large and powerful commoner with a mean streak. Jezal might have taken him for someone’s servant but that he had a pair of steels dangling loosely from one hand.

‘Gorst,’ West whispered in Jezal’s ear.

‘Huh. Looks more like a labourer than a swordsman to me.’

‘Maybe, but looks can lie.’ The sound of the crowd was slowly fading, and the nervy chatter within the room subsided along with it. West raised his eyebrows. ‘The King’s address,’ he whispered.

‘My friends! My countrymen! My fellow citizens of the Union!’ came a ringing voice, clearly audible even through the heavy doors.

‘Hoff,’ snorted West. ‘Even here he takes the King’s place. Why doesn’t he just put the crown on and have done with it?’

‘One month ago today,’ came the far-off bellow of the Lord Chamberlain, ‘fellows of mine on the Closed Council put forward the question . . . should there be a Contest this year?’ Boos and shouts of wild disapproval were heard from the crowd. ‘A fair question!’ cried Hoff, ‘for we are at war! A deadly struggle in the North! The very liberties which we hold so dear, the very freedoms which make us the envy of the world, our very way of life, stand threatened by the savage!’

A clerk began making his way around the room, separating the contestants from their families, their trainers, their friends. ‘Good luck,’ said West, clapping Jezal on the shoulder, ‘I’ll see you out there.’ Jezal’s mouth was dry, and he could only nod.

‘And these were brave men who asked the question!’ Boomed out Hoff’s voice from beyond the doors. ‘Wise men! Patriots all! My stalwart colleagues on the Closed Council! I understood why they might think, there should be no Contest this year!’ There was a long pause. ‘But I said to them, no!’

An eruption of manic cheering. ‘No! No!’ screamed the crowd. Jezal was ushered into line along with the other contestants, two abreast, eight pairs. He fussed with his steels as the Lord Chamberlain droned on, though he’d checked them twenty times already.

‘No, I said to them! Should we allow these barbarians, these animals of the frozen North, to tread upon our way of life?

Should we allow this beacon of freedom amidst the darkness of the world to be extinguished? No, I said to them! Our liberty is not for sale at any price! On this, my friends, my countrymen, my fellow citizens of the Union, on this you may depend . . . we will win this war!’

Another great ocean swell of approval. Jezal swallowed, glanced nervously around. Bremer dan Gorst was standing there beside him. The big bastard had the temerity to wink, grinning as if he hadn’t a care in the world. ‘Damn idiot,’ whispered Jezal, but he took care that his lips didn’t move.

‘And so, my friends, and so,’ came Hoff’s final cries, ‘what finer occasion could there be than when we stand upon the very brink of peril? To celebrate the skill, the strength, the prowess, of some of our nation’s bravest sons! My fellow citizens, my countrymen of the Union, I give you your contestants!’

The doors were heaved open and the roar of the crowd beyond rushed into the hall and made the rafters ring: suddenly, deafeningly loud. The front pair of swordsmen began to stride out through the bright archway, then the next pair, then the next. Jezal was sure he would freeze, motionless and staring like a rabbit, but when his turn came his feet stepped off manfully next to Gorst’s, the heels of his highly polished boots clicking across the tiled floor and through the high doorway.

The Square of Marshals was transformed. All around, great banks of seating had been erected, stretching back, and back, and up, and up on all sides, spilling over with a boiling multitude. The contestants filed down a deep valley between the towering stands towards the centre of this great arena, the beams, and struts, and tree-trunk supports like a shadowy forest on either side. Directly before them, seeming very far away, the fencing circle had been laid, a little ring of dry yellow grass in the midst of a sea of faces.

Down near the front Jezal could make out the features of the rich and noble. Dressed in their best, shading their eyes from the bright sun, on the whole fashionably disinterested in the spectacle before them. Further back, higher up, the figures became less distinct, the clothes less fine. The vast majority of the crowd were mere blobs and specks of colour, crammed in around the distant edge of the dizzying bowl, but the commoners made up for their distance with their excitement: cheering, shouting, standing up on their toes and waving their arms in the air. Above them, the tops of the very highest buildings around the square peered over, walls and roofs sticking up like islands in the ocean, the windows and parapets crammed with minuscule onlookers.

Jezal blinked at this great display of humanity. Part of him was aware that his mouth was hanging open, but too small a part to close it. Damn, he felt queasy. He knew he should have eaten something, but it was too late now. What if he puked, right here in front of half the world? He felt that surge of blind panic again. Where did he leave his steels? Where were they? In his hand. In his hand. The crowd roared, and sighed, and wailed, with a myriad of different voices.

The contestants began to move away from the circle. Not all of them would be fighting today, most would only watch. As though there was a need for extra spectators. They began to make their way towards the front rows, but Jezal was not going with them, more was the pity. He made for the enclosures where the contestants prepared to fight.

He flopped down heavily next to West, closed his eyes and wiped his sweaty forehead as the crowd cheered on. Everything was too bright, too loud, too overpowering. Marshal Varuz was nearby, leaning over the side of the enclosure to shout in someone’s ear. Jezal stared across the arena at the occupants of the royal box opposite, hoping vainly for a distraction.