The Blade Itself

She sat there, all the while, looking back at him with her chin high, the side of her face with the worst bruises turned towards him, as though challenging him to say something. She is not much like to her brother. Not much like at all. I don’t think she’ll be bursting into tears in my dining room, or anywhere else.

“What can I do for you, Inquisitor?” she asked him coldly. He detected the very slightest slurring of the word Inquisitor. She has been drinking… though she hides it well. Not enough to make her stupid. Glokta pursed his lips. For some reason he had the feeling that he needed to watch his step.

“I’m not here in a professional capacity. Your brother asked me to—”

She cut him off rudely. “Did he? Really? Here to make sure I don’t fuck the wrong man, are you?” Glokta waited for a moment, allowing that to sink in, then he began to chuckle softly to himself. Oh, that’s grand! I begin to quite like her! “Something funny?” she snapped.

“Pardon me,” said Glokta, wiping his running eye with a finger, “but I spent two years in the Emperor’s prisons. I daresay, if I had known I’d be there half that long at the start, I would have made a more concerted effort to kill myself. Seven hundred days, give or take, in the darkness. As close to hell, I would have thought, as a living man can go. My point is this—if you mean to upset me you’ll need more than harsh language.”

Glokta treated her to his most revolting, toothless, crazy smile. There were few people indeed who could stomach that for long, but she did not look away for an instant. Soon, in fact, she was smiling back at him. A lopsided grin of her own, and one which he found oddly disarming. A different tack, perhaps.

“The fact is, your brother asked me to look after your welfare while he is away. As far as I’m concerned you can fuck whomever you please, though my general observation has been that, as far as the reputations of young women are concerned, the less fucking the better. The reverse is true for young men of course. Hardly fair, but then life is unfair in so many ways, this one hardly seems worth commenting on.”

“Huh. You’re right there.”

“Good,” said Glokta, “so we understand each other then. I see that you hurt your face.”

She shrugged. “I fell. I’m a clumsy fool.”

“I know how you feel. I’m such a fool I knocked half my teeth out and hacked my leg to useless pulp. Look at me now, a cripple. It’s amazing where a little foolishness can take you, if it goes unchecked. We clumsy types should stick together, don’t you think?”

She looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, stroking the bruises on her jaw. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose we should.”

Goyle’s Practical, Vitari, was sprawled on a chair opposite Glokta, just outside the huge dark doors to the Arch Lector’s office. She was slumped into it, poured onto it, draped over it like a wet cloth, long limbs dangling, head resting on the back. Her eyes twitched lazily around the room from time to time under heavy lids, sometimes coming to rest on Glokta himself for insultingly long periods. She never turned her head though, or indeed moved a muscle, as though the effort might be too painful.

Which, indeed, it probably would be.

Plainly, she had been involved in a most violent melee, hand to hand. Above her black collar, her neck was a mass of mottled bruises. There were more around her black mask, a lot more, and a long cut across her forehead. One of her drooping hands was heavily bandaged, the knuckles of the other were scratched and scabbed over. She’s taken more than a couple of knocks. Fighting hard, against someone who meant business.

The tiny bell jumped and tinkled. “Inquisitor Glokta,” said the secretary, as he hurried out from behind his desk to open the door, “his Eminence will see you now.”

Glokta sighed, grunted and heaved on his cane as he got to his feet. “Good luck,” said the woman as he limped past.

“What?”

She gave a barely perceptible nod towards the Arch Lector’s office. “He’s in a hell of a mood today.”

As the door opened, Sult’s voice washed out into the ante-room, changing from a muffled murmuring into an all-out scream. The secretary jerked back from the gap as if slapped in the face.

“Twenty Practicals!” shrieked the Arch Lector, from beyond the archway. “Twenty! We should have been questioning that bitch now, instead of sitting here, licking our wounds! How many Practicals?”

“Twenty, Arch Lec—”