08 A Little Hatred: Book One (The Age of Madness)

Vick didn’t like rewards. Not even ones she’d earned. They felt too much like debts she might have to repay. She thought about saying, Only to serve, or some patriotic guff, but that would’ve been her sugaring the pudding too much. She settled for, ‘No.’

‘Let me get you some better lodgings, at least.’

‘What’s wrong with the ones I have?’

‘I know exactly what’s wrong with them. I used to live in them. When I served my predecessor, Arch Lector Sult.’

‘They serve my purposes.’

‘They served mine, but I didn’t mind getting better ones. There are people who take far more for far less.’

‘That’s up to them.’

He smiled as though he knew exactly what she was thinking. Had expected it, even. ‘Perhaps you somehow feel, if you do not take the rewards for your work, it is as if you have not done the work? Because we both know you did the work.’

‘I’ll take new lodgings when the job’s done, Your Eminence.’ She watched a gardener rake leaves into a barrow. A thankless task, every breeze bringing more onto the narrow patch he’d already cleared. ‘Things could’ve gone much better in Valbeck. Risinau escaped. Judge as well. He may be dangerous. She most definitely is. Many more left the city before the crown prince arrived, and I don’t think the outcome will have made them any less eager for their Great Change.’

‘Nor do I. The Breakers have been … broken … only for the time being.’

‘Risinau was a fat dreamer. I don’t believe he planned the uprising on his own.’

‘I am inclined to agree.’ The Arch Lector swept the park with his narrowed eyes, lowered his voice a cautious fraction. ‘But I am beginning to suspect the roots of our problem may lie at the opposite end of the social scale.’ And he shifted his glance significantly sideways. The gilded dome of the new Lords’ Round peeped glinting over the trees.

‘The nobles?’

‘They were taxed heavily to pay for the king’s wars in Styria.’ Glokta scarcely moved his thin lips as he spoke. ‘They demanded reforms to compensate, acquired a great deal of common land. Many lined their pockets handsomely. Nonetheless, most of the Open Council recently signed a letter of complaint to the king.’

‘Complaining of what?’

‘The usual things. Not enough power. Not enough money.’

‘Demanding what?’

‘The usual things. More money. More power.’

‘You’re suspicious of the men who signed this letter?’

‘Absolutely.’ Glokta reached up with his handkerchief to dab at his weepy eye. ‘But far less than I am of the ones who did not.’

‘Names, Your Eminence?’

‘The Brocks I can excuse, they have been rather busy in the North. But the young Lords Heugen, Barezin and above all Isher smile entirely too much. They lost out when the king was elected, or at any rate their fathers did. They have the largest grievances, but make no complaints.’

‘You think one of them could have been behind the uprising?’

‘It is the nature of men, especially ambitious men, to be unhappy. Happy ones make me nervous. And Isher, in particular, is cunning. He was involved in the drafting of these new land rules and they have made him exceptionally rich.’

‘Worries at both ends of the social scale,’ murmured Vick. ‘Troubled times.’

Glokta watched that gardener struggle to clear the unclearable lawn. ‘They always are.’

Civilisation

The deck creaked under her feet, the sailcloth snapped with the wind, seabirds wheeled and squawked in the salt air above.

‘By the dead,’ muttered Rikke.

The city was a vast cream-coloured crescent, stretching around the wind-whipped, grey-green bay. A mass of walls, and bridges, and endless buildings crusted together like barnacles at low tide, rivers and canals glinting dully among them. Towers stuck up above, and great chimneys tall as towers, their brown smoke smeared across the skies.

She’d heard it was big. Everyone had heard that. If anyone went to Adua, they’d come back scratching their heads and saying, ‘It’s big,’ but she’d never expected it to be this big. You might’ve fitted a hundred Uffriths into it and still had room for a hundred Carleons. Her eye couldn’t make sense of the scale. The number of buildings, the number of ships, the number of people, like ants in an anthill. A thousand anthills. The thought of it was making her head spin. Or spin more, maybe. She looked down at the deck, rubbing her temples. She’d been feeling insignificant enough already.

‘By the dead,’ she muttered again, puffing out her cheeks.

‘Adua,’ said the man standing next to her. ‘The centre of the world.’ He was a thickset old fellow with heavy brows, a short grey beard and a bald head looked like it had been beaten out of iron on an anvil, all planes and knobbles. ‘The poets call her the City of White Towers, though they tend towards the grey-brown these days. Beautiful, isn’t she, from a distance?’ He leaned nearer. ‘Believe me, though, she stinks when you get close.’