Author: Abercrombie, Joe
Date: 2023-05-25T00:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Subterranean Press

The Great Change (and Other Lies)

Copyright © 2023 by Joe Abercrombie.

All rights reserved.

Dust jacket and interior illustrations

Copyright © 2023 by John Anthony Di Giovanni.

All rights reserved.

Interior design

Copyright © 2023 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

All rights reserved.

Ebook Edition

ISBN

978-1-64524-065-5

Subterranean Press

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519
subterraneanpress.com

For Lou,

With grim, dark
hugs

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Thread

The Stone

The Point

The Great Change

“There is a certain relief in change,
even though it be from bad to worse.”

Washington Irving

Introduction

These stories were written as companion pieces to The Age of Madness, so it’s sensible, and in a couple of cases even essential, to read those books first. It’s probably best not to read “The Thread,” and definitely not “The Stone,” until you’ve finished A Little Hatred. It’s sensible not to read “The Point”until you’ve completed The Wisdom of Crowds. But if you heed one warning, heed this one: you ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT read “The Great Change”until you’ve completed The Age of Madness altogether.

Ever since The Heroes, there have been special editions of my First Law books that have come with an extra short story. Just a little episode that gives an insight into the past of a key character, or fleshes out an important event, or gives a different and complimentary point of view to something seen in the books. In thinking about what short stories I might write to accompany The Age of Madness, I was forced to ask myself—what are these books about? Always a horrible question for an author to answer, since books are invariably about all kinds of things, and become about all kinds of other things in the process of writing. But one theme that stuck out was Change.

Something that frustrated me about much of the epic fantasy I read as a kid was that it seemed to take place in an unchangeable world—a medieval sandbox which had stayed much the same for apparently thousands of years. I wanted my world to feel like it was in a constant state of painful flux and development—like our own—a place where conflict doesn’t just arise from a battle between abstract good and evil, but where it grew out of competing interests born of the great tectonic shifts of economics, technology, and society. So The First Law took place in a time when commerce was in the ascendancy, a new merchant class was clawing power from the traditional aristocracy, and money (and with it, the banks) was becoming all-powerful. For The Age of Madness, the model for the next great social and technological upheaval, even more powerful and painful than the last, was the Industrial Revolution.

It seemed natural, then, in writing three stories to accompany three books, to look at three different industries—how technology was transforming them, how that was transforming the lives of the myriad different people involved and the relationships between them, and how the web of commerce and industry was knitting the whole world ever more tightly together. This allowed each story to take a big slice right through the social strata and introduce us to all kinds of different points of view—which I think is one of my strengths as a writer, if I have any. It also had the added advantage of letting me show off some of my research, which is hugely important. I read about this stuff so I can inflict it on my readers, not so I can keep it to myself, thank you very much.

“The Thread” literally follows the thread, from the ex-slaves working in the fields of Gurkhul, through the mills of Adua and the overworked seamstresses, to a dress that’s just not quite good enough for that infamously fastidious leader of fashion Lady Savine dan Glokta. “The Stone” follows one exceptional rock from the rivers of the parched south through the smugglers, spivs, merchants, and jewellers of the burgeoning diamond trade each taking their cut, and ends with the stone that so many have sweated, schemed and haggled over being not quite good enough for the King of the Union’s new crown. “The Point,” meanwhile, digs iron from the penal mines of Angland, forges that iron into a dagger, and the dagger, by a circuitous route, finds its way into the hands of a certain member of the Burners and…well, you’ll get the point.

“The Great Change” is something slightly different—again it is a chain of varied points of view, but it follows not an industry, but an idea—the idea of that grand revolution, that blow for the common man, that effort to sweep the past away wholesale—the Great Change itself. It begins just after the events of Red Country, and ends as A Little Hatred is getting underway, with several of its key characters passing through. It intersects much more closely with the events of The Age of Madness and puts them in a very different light. In a couple of cases it even features the same scenes but from very different points of view. It is strongly recommended that no one reads this particular story until they have finished The Wisdom of Crowds…it does rather give the game away…

The Thread

Sabra picked the last few bolls from the latest plant, pods bursting open with white fluff, tossed them into her bag and blew a long sigh as she straightened. She squinted up at the sun, wiped the sweat from her forehead, slapped the fluff from her sore fingertips, shifted the strap of the bag on her sore shoulder, rubbed at her sore back and blew out another sigh. The usual routine.

“Hard work, eh?” said Kurin, nudging his hat back so he could wipe his own sweat-beaded forehead.

He always seemed to be close by. Tending to the next row of plants when they were picking. Stuffing the bale beside hers when they were packing. Setting his plate on the table next to hers when they were eating. She thought she caught him looking at her, sometimes. Or maybe she just wanted to think so. He was a fine-looking man, after all, with those broad shoulders and those good teeth and that easy smile.

She took a nervous glance about, worried the overseer might notice them talking, then remembered that the overseer was gone. Dragged through the dust behind a donkey then beaten to death with shovels, and not at all missed. They were not slaves any more. They were free, and could talk as much as they pleased. As long as they filled their quota.

“Hot work,” she said, pressing her own hat down a little, half to hide from the sun, half to hide from Kurin. She thought she might be blushing, a little.

“Here.” He offered her his flask. Then he wiped the neck with his sleeve, and offered it again. His sleeve was dirty. All their sleeves were. But it was a nice gesture. No doubt she would have found it a less nice gesture had he been less nice looking. But that is the ugly truth about pretty people.

She wanted to slosh it all over her face, but took what she imagined was a ladylike sip instead, and handed it back. “Very kind,” she said, hiding behind the brim of her hat again.

“Have some more, if you want,” he said, still smiling. “We’re free now.”

She thought about that. “Yes. We’re free.” And she took another sip, as if to prove the point to herself.

They were free, and that was a great thing. A wonderful thing. A thing they had all begged God for, for so many years. Only sometimes Sabra wondered if things had changed all that much after all.

As a slave she had slept in a stinking crumbling shack and ate lentil paste. Now she was free she lived in the same stinking crumbling shack and ate the same lentil paste but had to pay the man who lived in her old master’s house for the privilege. Her master had been hacked to pieces and she had shed no tears for him at all, but the man who lived in the house now looked at her just the same way he had.

If a slave had filled their bag too slowly they might have been beaten. Might have been lashed. Made an example of, to encourage the others. Now, if a worker could not meet their quota, they would not be paid. Then they would have no roof. Then they would have no food. Then one day they would be gone, and a new worker found. There were always new workers. She had heard that was how they did things in the Union. They boasted they had no slaves there. But she was not sure it was better, any more. In her dark moments, she wondered if it might be worse.

But she did not want to let Kurin see her dark moments, so she smiled as she handed the flask back to him. Things had not changed as much as she might have wanted. But at least she could smile now. “Thank you,” she said, as she bent down to the next plant and started plucking the bolls, pods bursting open with white fluff.

“You are lucky,” said Kurin, still watching her, still smiling.

She looked up at that. “I have never once in my life thought so.”

“You are short.”

She drew herself up to her full height which was, admittedly, not high. “We are all the height God made us.”

“And, thanks to God, you do not have to stoop so low as I do to pick.”

Sabra could not help laughing. No doubt it would have been less funny if he had been less pretty. But there was the ugly truth again. “True. But my back still aches by evening. And when my bag gets full it drags along the ground, while yours wafts at your knees and keeps them cool, like a fine lady’s dress.”

Kurin laughed. “True. I never thought of that. Perhaps we are both luckier than we thought.”

“Perhaps,” said Sabra, but she was not convinced.

Down near the fence, the wagons were trundling out. Trundling off through the dust to Dagoska, laden down with bales almost as tall as she was. Sabra wondered how much of her work, her sweat, her pain went into one of those big grey blocks. But wondering did not help. She gave a sigh, and wiped the sweat from her forehead, and started plucking the fluff from the plants, stuffing it into the bag.

The quota wouldn’t fill itself.

“And how can we enrich each other today?” asked Baseem, smiling wide at this sunburned pink fool. He could afford to smile, after all.

Business was good.

The square before the Great Temple of Dagoska seethed with buyers and sellers, screaming over each other in thirty languages. The honk and bray of livestock, the clatter of scales and measures, the righteous jingle of coins from every land in the Circle of the World.

This pink buyer was frowning at one of Baseem’s bales. One of the ones that just came in. The only bales Baseem had were ones that had just come in. As soon as they came in, he sold them on. “I can pay forty a bale,” he grumbled, in broken Kantic.

Baseem smiled. He could afford to smile all day.

Business was better than it had ever been. Better than when Baseem was a boy, and he had first worked in this square for his father, and the pinks had swarmed across the Circle Sea to buy silks and linens. Before the pinks made the city a part of the Union, took the trade for themselves and ruined it. Before the Gurkish conquered the city and stopped the trade altogether. Now the Prophet had gone wherever Prophets go, presumably heaven but probably the other direction, the Gurkish were gone and Dagoska belonged to the Dagoskans once again, and business was better than ever.

“These are sixty a bale,” said Baseem, calmly.

“Sixty?” asked the man, voice squeaky with outrage. “You’d be robbing me at fifty!”

“And yet sixty is my price.”

“I can stretch to fifty-five and not a coin further.”

Baseem smiled. Fifty-five would have been a ridiculous price last season, but prices kept going up. He was fixed on sixty, which was twice what he had paid. “Sixty,” he said, “is my price.”

One might have thought, because the pinks had killed Baseem’s father in one of their many purges and trashed the business and turned Dagoska to a bloody ruin with their corruption and mismanagement, that he would take particular delight in fleecing this sunburned Union bastard, but Baseem played no favourites. He would fleece people of Suljuk, Styria, the Old Empire, the North, Gurkhul, Kadir, Yashtavit or other Dagoskans, for that matter, if the opportunity presented itself, and all with equal enthusiasm. Prejudice is a luxury no good merchant can afford, his father had always said. Before they hung him.

“It’s the best quality, my friend,” said Baseem, slapping one of the bales and sending up a little cloud of dust. “Kadiri, from the rich slopes of the Rhozin valley. The very best!” It was no better than average and probably worse, poorly packed from some dry plantation far from the water, but honesty was a thing for the church not for the market. This damn pink fool would not know the difference, and if he did would not have cared. Any old rubbish sold now.

The pink narrowed his eyes in a show of suspicion. “Not trying to fleece me?”

Baseem dismissed it with a snort. “Firstly, I live on my reputation.” Baseem’s reputation was no better than average and probably worse, but no one cared because his goods were in such high demand. “Secondly, I would not dare.” Though in fact he would have dared anything if the price was right and often had before business got so good he did not have to. “Thirdly, how would I fool a man of your discernment?” This pink was an oaf and a braggart and fooled himself every morning that he was any kind of merchant. “But by all means, my friend, if you can find better a better price then go with God, I will not have to look long for another buyer.”

Across the sea, after all, the machines needed to be fed. More of them and hungrier every day. And Baseem turned towards the boiling mass of buyers clogging the market.

“All right!” said the pink, as Baseem had known he would. “All right. Sixty a bale.” And he pulled open his purse and started sourly counting out coins.

“You will not regret it, my friend,” said Baseem, who did not care a log of camel shit whether this pink idiot regretted it or not. “One hundred bales down to the docks!” he bellowed at his son, whose shoulders slumped as he started to gather the porters.

The boy was not eager. He was easily distracted. He was nothing like Baseem had been, when he worked for his father. So keen to learn! But also to talk to girls. He frowned after his son. Perhaps he was being unfair on the boy, the way his wife was always telling him. But fair was for church, not for market. And it had been a while since Baseem had much time for church.

Business was good, after all. Business had never been so good.

He turned to the next pink, sweat-beaded, ignorant merchant, rubbing his hands. “And how can we enrich each other today?” he asked.

“Don’t like this,” muttered Jens, watching his people tending to the spinning machines. Too many open parts. Wheels and belts and drive-shafts flying.

He wondered when the next accident would be. Could you call it an accident, really, if you knew it was coming? Knew it was a question of when, not if? He winced, and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. Wasn’t sleeping well. Hadn’t been sleeping well since the last accident. He could still hear that girl’s screams.

“Careful, everyone,” he called as he strode down the shed, slapping backs, giving the thumbs up, dishing out the encouragements. “Nice and careful, eh?”

Jens had told Zeitser he was worried about safety, but Zeitser hadn’t wanted to hear it. He’d said, “You’re a foreman not a nursemaid.” He’d said, “Safety’s not your business, just getting the thread onto the bobbins.” As many strides of thread as man and machine could deliver.

There was a big new order. Big new client. Vallimir, or someone, up in Valbeck, weaving new fabrics from it on those bloody great water-driven looms they had up there. Always new clients. Always bigger looms. Always more strides of thread screaming off the rollers. Made him think of that girl’s screams. Couldn’t be good for the machinery, pushed this fast, this long.

Jens had told Zeitser there’d be fewer strides all round if the machines broke down from being worked too hard, or the workers broke down from being worked too hard, but Zeitser hadn’t wanted to hear that either. He’d said, “Ladies need dresses, and have no patience with excuses.”

Jens wondered how much patience they’d have when their bloody dresses fell apart while they were wearing ’em. He stepped up to squint at the yarn. Twisted it between finger and thumb. “Don’t like this,” he muttered. It was coming off the rollers fluffy. Loose. “These new bales are no bloody good!” he roared at Hanner.

“They’re bloody shit!” Hanner roared back over the noise. Then he shrugged. “But we can only spin with the bales we’ve got.”

Jens had told Zeitser he was worried about the quality, and Zeitser had looked at him as if quality, like safety, was a word in a foreign tongue, and said, “You’re a foreman not a needleworker,” then, “No one cares a shit about the quality, just the number of strides on the bobbins.”

Jens was no fool. He’d seen the visitor, late at night, coming to the corner office with his papers. A neat little colourless man, with Valint and Balk on his neat little case. Zeitser had a debt, and interest to pay, and masters of his own too, masters even harder to satisfy than Zeitser was himself. So he couldn’t care about safety, or quality, or working too hard. All he cared about was the strides.

“Careful, everyone!” Jens called. “Nice and careful and productive, eh?” They could stop at sundown and still get a few hundred strides out. Not enough for Master Zeitser, of course. You could’ve wrapped the bloody world in thread and it wouldn’t have been enough for Zeitser.

Jens shook his head, and watched the yarn screaming off the rollers, and wondered when the next accident would be.

“Damn this thread!” snarled Grette. It had bloody snapped again. She raised the needle as if she’d dash it on the ground, but she knew if she did that she’d spend hours on her knees searching for it, and she didn’t have hours to spare.

“This thread,” she hissed, “what’s wrong with this bloody thread?”

The thread was bad. She knew the thread was bad. But the truth was she had bigger problems than the thread. When things first got blurry after a long session with the needle, she hadn’t wanted to admit it. She hadn’t dared to admit it. Told herself it was nothing. First she’d just had trouble in the candlelight. Just with the embroidery. She’d had so many orders, and no one she could trust with the fine work. But soon enough it was all the time. Now there was no denying it.

She couldn’t see.

She pressed the heels of her trembling hands over her eyes, felt tears prickling the inside of her lids.

“This one has to be good,” she whimpered. “This one has to be my best.”

The last dress hadn’t been good enough. Selest dan Heugen had been scathing. Refused to pay. What that had cost her. In money. In time. In reputation. She couldn’t afford another failure. But, by the Fates, everything was blurred now, by candlelight, by daylight, by every light. She could hardly tell whether the work was good or bad, and now even the bloody thread was letting her down.

She rocked back from the table, turned her face away. Didn’t want to risk her tears staining the cloth. The cost of this cloth. By the Fates. But it was late, and there was so much to do, and she never did her best work when she was rushed. “This one has to be good.”

She felt Maree’s hand on her trembling shoulder. “You have to take a rest, Mama. Maybe I could do some of it—”

“Don’t be fucking ridiculous!” Grette screeched, and an instant later brought her voice down again. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Just…you know you can’t do the fine work. You know it has to be me. But I’m already late, and the piece is for a function tomorrow night and if it isn’t ready…Fates, if it isn’t ready…” She felt the prickle of tears in her useless eyes again. If it wasn’t ready she’d be done. If it wasn’t ready her reputation would be sunk, and the great ladies who trusted her wouldn’t trust her any more. If it wasn’t ready she’d be ruined. Every dress had to be better than the one before. Costlier cloth, neater work, finer embroidery, extra detail, and those ladies were vengeful as Glustrod if they didn’t get exactly what they wanted. The finer the lady, the more savage the treatment.

“There’s just…” Her voice quivered. “There’s just so much to do.”

She undid her top button. Fates, it felt as if she was suffocating. All that mass of cloth and lace and flounce in her lap, smothering her, choking her. She was trying to find the eye of the needle with the thread but, Fates help her, the whole needle was a blur, her whole hand a smudge, how could she ever hope to find the eye with this horrible, loose, fluffy thread?

“At least let me thread it for you, Mama,” came Maree’s voice, sounding close to tears herself. “At least let me thread it.”

“Yes.” Grette let the thread drop, let the needle fall from her aching fingers. “Yes, you do it.” Closed her eyes and just breathed a moment. Tried to settle down. Her nerves had never been the strongest.

“There, Mama. There you go. You breathe, now. Shall I bring up another candle?”

“Yes. Thank you, dear. I’d be lost without you.” She was lost anyway. Grette took a shuddering breath. Had to be calm. Had to keep the hands steady. She bent to the work again. “Bring up another couple.”

And she gritted her teeth, squinting desperately, trying to force her aching eyes to focus on the cloth. In, and out, so gentle, so neat, and in, and out, and just a little tug, and—

“Fuck this fucking thread!” she screeched.

Freid eased back the packaging to take a peek. Always an exciting moment when a new dress arrived. That beautiful cloth Lady Savine had picked out, and the lace was fine as ever, but… Freid frowned, easing the paper back further, tracing a seam with her fingertips. The stitching did not look good at all.

“Dear, dear,” she murmured, and took the dress upstairs as gently as if it was worth more than her. Which it definitely was.

“From Grette Brine?” Zuri walked over to her in the outer dressing room. Such a fine walk, she had, so graceful. “Better late than never, I suppose.”

“Maybe,” said Freid, doubtfully.

Zuri looked up at her, black brows high. “That bad?”

Freid held the straps against her own shoulders and shook the dress out down her front so Zuri could get a good look. “To my eye, not near good enough.”

“You have a very good eye, Freid.” Zuri came close, letting that beautiful cloth slide through her long fingers, judging the way it fell. “If you say it is not good enough…”

“Grette’s delivered?” Through the half-open door Freid could see Lady Savine, still as a statue in her half-constructed underwear, a dozen different splintered images of herself reflected in the differently angled mirrors. She couldn’t turn her head ’cause Metello was up on the step-ladder seeing to her wig, but she glanced sidelong towards the dress. “How is it?”

“To my eye,” murmured Zuri, sinking down and taking up the hem, holding the stitching to the light, “not nearly good enough.”

“Well you have the best eye I know,” said Lady Savine. “If you say it is not good enough then I have no doubt it is not.” Freid saw Lisbit pout a little at that as she mixed her powders. But there was no point arguing with the facts. Zuri had the best eye anyone knew, which was how she got to be Lady Savine’s companion in the first place. And the stitching wasn’t good enough, even Freid had seen that right away.

“Grette made such beautiful dresses,” said Lady Savine, wistfully.

Freid nodded. “Some of the best stitching I ever saw.”

“Dress-makers are like dresses, perhaps,” murmured Zuri. “They only last so long.” She frowned at the hem, plucked something from it and held it to the light. “God’s breath, there is a dangling thread here.”

Metello gave a gasp of outrage around the comb in her teeth. Lisbit looked disgusted. “Trying to put our mistress in rags,” she muttered angrily.

“Shall I withhold payment?” asked Zuri, as she stood.

Lady Savine gave a frustrated sigh, muscles in her shoulders working as they rose, then dropped. “Pay her half. For old time’s sake. But we shall be giving her no further commissions.”

“Very good, my lady,” said Zuri, making a note in her book.

“What shall I do with it?” asked Freid. Looking at it as wardrobe maid to Savine dan Glokta, the stitching was a fucking disgrace. Looking at it as a girl who grew up on the wrong side of the Arches, by the Fates, it was still a beautiful dress. She thought of how her mother would’ve felt, just to touch the cloth.

“Lady Savine cannot wear that,” said Zuri. “And no one can see what she might have worn. Burn it.” She swept away towards the door. “And bring the blue one.”

The Stone

It couldn’t be.

No one ever found anything here, upstream, at the top of the diggings. Nothing but sores and sunburn anyway.

It couldn’t be. As big as this?

But the more Faris looked at it, the more sure he became. Some grey-green rock clung to one side of it but, God, as he nudged it gently over with his rake he saw it was all crystal, bright sun flashing on its wet edges.

It couldn’t be. But what else could it be?

He hunched over it jealously, so the other boys working in his pit couldn’t see. He had never seen a stone a fraction of the size. As he lifted it from the water’s edge, with all the reverence he might give a holy relic, he could barely close his trembling fist around it.

He glanced up, heart thudding in his ears, but the closest guard was sitting in the shade of a boulder, head back and helmet tipped over his face, lazily waving away flies. The guards at this end of the diggings were never watching. No one ever found anything here, after all.

How often, after another back-breaking, skin-cracking, sun-blistered day, had he dreamed of shouting those wonderful words? I found one! Words that might win him a few good meals and the rest of the day off. But, in that moment, he started to think it was a poor reward for such a stone as this. Hafedieh would give him a far better one. All the boys said so. And for a stone like this it was worth the risk.

Faris shut his suddenly dry mouth, and slipped the stone into his cloth where it sat, cold and wet and heavy against his balls. Then he plucked up some other stone, some lump of gravel just like the thousands that filled his pit, the millions that made up the diggings, and he took a deep breath, and readied himself, and tossed down his rake and screeched, “I found one!”

Hundreds of eyes turned jealously upon him as he scampered down the path with that worthless rock held high. Following the slow flow of the river, dammed and channelled and chopped into a winking mass of ever-wider, ever-shallower ponds, filled with children up to their ankles, their knees, their waists in the chill mountain water, shovelling, raking, sifting, chafed and wrinkled from the damp, crooked from long days bent over. The Overseer strode to meet him, sweat-beaded forehead furrowed with interest, grabbed the piece of gravel and held it eagerly to the light while Faris looked around proudly at the other boys.

“This is nothing.” The overseer tossed the stone away and it bounced from the hundreds, thousands, millions of others. Then he slapped Faris across the face with an open hand and knocked him on his back.

Faris sat there, face burning, taste of blood on his lips. “I’m sorry, sir. I’m sorry.” But the Overseer had already turned away. He had dozens of other rocks to check, and dozens of other boys to hit.

One of the older ones in the ponds at the bottom of the slope snorted contempt at him. “Fucking fool.” And went back to his raking.

Faris walked off hangdog, wiping his bloody mouth and rubbing the wet sand from his hair and shaking his head as if he could scarcely bear the shame while his skin sang with excitement. He made himself not run, only trudge over to Hafedieh, on her haunches beside her water bucket, and he gave her a look from under his brows. That meaningful look, and she gave him one back as she handed him the ladle.

He drank, and made sure that no one was watching, then he slipped the stone from his cloth and into the ladle as he took it from his lips. When she saw the size of what was in there her eyes went wide, just for a moment, before she dumped the ladle back into the bucket, and gave him the slightest wink. Then she stood, and slapped her palms clean, hoisted her bucket over one shoulder, and without a word spoken headed for the gate in the fence.

Every sunset after work the guards stripped every child and picked through their hair and peered in their mouths and made them squat and cough but they never once looked in that bucket. Perhaps they were fools. Or perhaps Hafedieh paid them not to.

Either way, Faris would be paid tonight. He trudged back uphill, past the ponds, past the children, rubbing sadly at his sore cheek. But he was smiling on the inside as he picked up his rake again.

The woman started as Zaida slipped from the trees into the darkened clearing.

“Who are you?” she asked.

Zaida smiled, stepping slowly towards her, palm raised, as if she was trying to calm an animal. She could feel the woman’s nervousness. Not surprising given what she was carrying. “You can call me Zaida. And you are Hafedieh. You give water to the children at the mine.”

The woman swallowed, throat shifting, nervousness turning to fear. “Where is Kletu?”

“Kletu could not come. It turns out Kletu is little better than a pirate. He was buying stolen stones from the workers at the diggings, and selling them to smugglers. I had to kill him.”

The woman turned to run, but in a breath Zaida was across the clearing and blocking her path, the wind of her passing ripping leaves from the bushes and knocking the woman over onto her back, stones scattering from her bag and glittering in the dirt.

“Please stay,” said Zaida.

The woman stared up at her. Shocked. Terrified. Zaida could feel the blood pulsing fast through her throat, through her meat.

“Are you an Eater?” she breathed.

“I do not like the word.” Zaida frowned down at her robe, and gave an exasperated sigh. She had moved so fast she had torn the cloth wide open. “But I cannot deny it.”

The woman wriggled backwards through the dust. She knew she could not get away, and yet she tried, and Zaida followed her. “I did a foolish thing,” she whispered. “Taking the stones. I’ve never done it before—”

“You have been doing it for years.”

“I just want to feed my children. I just want to give them…the things I never had—”

“Oh, your lovely little babies, the fruit of your womb, the light of your life! How many do you have?”

“Two.” The woman swallowed. “A boy and a girl.”

“I would say I am disappointed,” said Zaida, “but it is never a great surprise when a thief turns out to be a liar also. I know who you are, Hafedieh, and the only children you have are the hundreds at the diggings. The ones you give water to. The ones you take diamonds from.”

Hafedieh wriggled back into a tree, and there she stopped. She had run out. Of ground and of lies. Her face crushed up, and her eyes filled with tears, and they began to spill down her face.

Zaida looked down thoughtfully at her. “You have beautiful eyes.” Her memories were faint, from the time before her change, back when she cried, and laughed, and felt things so strongly. But sometimes a smell, a snatch of music, a face in a crowd would suck some glimpse of the past into her mind, as strong as if it were yesterday. This woman’s eyes looked like her sister’s. Her sister, smiling, singing in the sun, dancing in the garden. How long had she been dead?

“Are you going to kill me?” whispered Hafedieh.

“Who would bring me more stones then?” And Zaida squatted before the woman, and pulled out the purse she had taken from Kletu, with his blood still damp upon it, and pressed it into Hafedieh’s hands. “I will pay you what Kletu would have paid you for these.” And she took the bag, and looked inside, and saw more stones there, gleaming. One looked very large. That would fetch a fine price. “If you find any more, bring them to me, and I will pay for those too, and you need never deal with…” Zaida wrinkled her nose. “His sort of man again.”

“How would I find you?”

“Oh, I have sharp hearing. Whisper my name to the wind, I will find you.”

The woman blinked more tears down the glistening tracks on her face. “I thought you would say that the stones belong to the Prophet…”

“The Prophet would no doubt have said so. The Prophet would have wagged his lecturing finger and wrinkled his stern brow. The Prophet would have seen you hung in a cage for stealing them and blah, blah, blah.” A breeze came up, and Zaida watched it stir the palm leaves, and listened to the crickets chirp, far off. She tipped her head back, and looked at the stars, scattered like diamonds across heaven’s cloth indeed, and sighed. “The Prophet is gone. We that remain must make our own choices, and if we choose a better world, it must be paid for.” And she grinned. “You might say I have become more interested in profit…than Prophet.” For some reason that joke never stopped amusing her. Perhaps now she was free to be amused, she had a great deal to catch up on.

The woman swallowed, still pressed against the tree trunk, if anything more scared than ever. “What kind of an Eater are you?” she whispered.

Zaida chucked the woman under the chin, and stood. “The new kind.”

Manok glided into Westport at sunset. Not by day—that would have been making an exhibition of himself. Not by darkness—that would have looked like he had something to hide. He had no trouble finding a berth, because his was neither a large boat nor a small one, neither especially well maintained and handled nor conspicuously badly. It was important to find moderation in all things. Especially for a smuggler.

He ambled down the quay at a comfortable pace with a nod and a smile for everyone. Manok was well liked in Westport. He was well liked everywhere he went. Partly because of the nods and the smiles but mostly, he had to admit, because of the bribes.

“Sergeant Jovidi!” And as Manok shook the guard’s big paw he slipped a purse into it, with the offhand dexterity of a man who did a lot of bribing.

“Manok!” said Jovidi, squeezing his hand back and pocketing the coins with the offhand dexterity of a man often bribed. “How was the voyage?”

“Little rough, but I keep going. I put something extra in there.” Generosity was not merely good for the soul, it was good for business. A little goodwill among those in authority, on both sides of the water, was a sensible precaution against the buffets of fortune. “New shoes for your wife, perhaps?”

Jovidi grinned. “I wear shoes too.”

“Then you deserve to wear the best.” Manok clapped him on the arm, and ambled off up the wharf, out of the sun and into the cool shadows between the buildings. He smiled as he patted the leather pouch under his shirt. As simply as that it was done, and the stones were worth twice what he had paid for them in Ulrioch. There they had been Gurkish diamonds, unlicensed by the church, but Westport was in the Union, and so the stones were law-abiding Union citizens now, and could swan across the Circle Sea to Adua without raising any brows. His August Majesty the High King no doubt lived very well, after all. What difference would it really make if Manok politely demurred from making a contribution to his coffers?

There had been times he’d swum into Westport at night, times he’d slithered through the sewers, times he’d rolled the stones in honey and swallowed them, then spent the next day wishing they were smaller as he shat the bastards out. Manok almost missed those high, wild, dangerous years. But the truth was it was far safer, much drier, a great deal less wear on the anus, and just far better business all around to appeal to people’s greed.

Greed was the one thing in the diamond trade, after all, that could always be relied upon.

“I confess…” murmured Gabresi, once he’d recovered the power of speech, “I don’t ordinarily deal in stones of this size.” And he gave his best doubtful sigh. It wasn’t a lie as such. No one ordinarily dealt in stones of this size, as stones of this size were exceedingly rare. In truth Gabresi dealt most eagerly in whatever stones he could turn a profit from, and the bigger the stone the bigger the profit. But it would serve him well to seem reluctant, even if that became harder and harder the more closely he examined this stone under his jeweller’s lantern. The quality was as exceptional as the size.

“I’m not much moved by the quality—”

Manok laughed. “Shall we take it next door for a second opinion—?”

“No! No.” It was hard for Gabresi to keep his carefully cultivated careless manner with such a fortune sitting in the palm of his hand. There was new money in Midderland, with all the new mills and the new ideas and the new ways of doing things. There’d never been so much money, or so many people wanting to show their money off, and so the price of gems of every type, and diamonds in particular, was forever going up. Mad money. Ridiculous money. Mad, ridiculous, lovely money.

Gabresi let vent his best pained sigh. “There’s trouble in Midderland. Breakers, Burners, this business in Valbeck, these wars in Styria. Sentiment’s poor. So few buyers. The price of gems of every type, and diamonds in particular, has taken quite the plunge lately.”

Manok plucked the stone from his hand and turned towards the door. “I will definitely take a second opinion on that—”

“Wait!” There were times when being a slender man was a decided advantage—he often liked to think of all the money he had saved on cloth down the years when buying new clothes, for example—and now Gabresi slipped around the smuggler and insinuated himself between him and the exit. “Wait there just a moment.”

“Oh?” Manok opened his hand, and let that monstrous stone sit there in a shaft of dusty sunlight, glinting. “For what?”

Gabresi licked his lips. He knew that vulture Gort dan Breyer was in town, paying top money for top stones, and this was the stone of a career. He was already running the numbers on what he might make from it without so much as stepping into the street, and the figures were making his mouth water.

He issued his trademark extravagant sigh, as if minded against his better judgement to do a costly favour. “I will make you an offer,” he said.

“What would you do with this?” asked Breyer. “For the sake of argument?”

Vettel narrowed her eyes. “I have never appreciated jokes,” she said. Her husband had always called her humourless, but she preferred to think of herself as practical.

“Oh, I’m in earnest,” said Breyer.

“Wait…it’s real?” She snatched the stone from his hand—by the Fates, the weight of the thing—and fumbled her lens down over her eye. It was amazing, how the lenses had come on the last year or two. This new one was like magic. She could instantly tell the stone was real, after one breath that it was of fine colour and clarity, and after one more that it had no significant flaws. “Well I never…” she murmured.

Diamonds are like people—no two are quite alike. The cleaving of each stone was a puzzle to be solved, and one with no right answer. A hundred little choices, each a weighing of odds. One large stone might be worth far more than three smaller ones, but would be so much harder to sell. And then there was the risk of a mistake. To spoil one of three would be a disaster. To spoil one great stone could be fatal.

But cleaving a stone is as much art as science. Her father always told her that the best cutters trust their instincts. So she let her fingertips shift over the rough surface, feeling out its shape. Feeling out the shape that it wanted to be. Judging how it could be split. Diamonds are like people—they can seem impossibly hard, but they always have their weaker spots, their softer faces.

She perched the lens back on her forehead, lips pursed. “I would make a single oval brilliant from it.”

“A single stone?” said Breyer, raising his bushy brows.

“You would have perhaps eight or nine assorted small cuts into the bargain.” She expected, in fact, there would be at least a dozen, and the extras she could polish later and sell to a not especially scrupulous Angland jeweller of her acquaintance, doubling her take from the whole exercise. She felt no guilt whatsoever at the thought. A reasonable level of embezzlement was factored into the trade at every stage. How many miners, merchants, dealers, smugglers, spivs and middle-men would have wet their beak on a stone like this by the time some rich bastard actually wore it, after all, just for passing it from one hand to another? Dozens. Why shouldn’t Vettel wet her beak too, when it was her skill which would transform it from mud to magic? She was not running a fucking charity.

“Eight or nine?” asked Breyer, one eyebrow raised, perhaps calculating the level of embezzlement he considered acceptable.

“And dust, of course, which I will use for the polishing.” Vettel waved a hand towards the new grinding wheel, the new boy pedalling away and Foske squinting through his own lens as he buffed some little flats for a commission of Lady Wetterlant’s. “Diamonds are like people, after all—they need to be ground down a little before they reveal their best.”

“Why should I bring it to you?” Breyer narrowed his eyes, giving her as careful an assessment as she had given his stone. “Rather than to my good friends in the gem-cutter’s guild, with whom I have worked profitably for so many years?”

“Because your friends in the gem-cutter’s guild have a vested interest in keeping our business mired in the past. Outmoded cuts and outdated techniques, obsolete machinery and stale attitudes.” Vettel could not keep the contempt from her voice. She did not want to. “Because they take their fear and laziness and dress it up as proud tradition. Because I am not cossetted by their privileges, nor bound by their ridiculous rules. Because I will give you finer stones at a lower price. Because your friends in the gem-cutter’s guild may be better friends, but I am a better gem-cutter.”

A smile spread slowly across Breyer’s face, and he wagged a finger at her. “Savine dan Glokta was right about you.”

“I am delighted to have her as a partner,” said Vettel, who hated having that bitch as a partner but knew she could not do it without her.

“Very well. One oval brilliant it is. And ten assorted small cuts.” Breyer turned towards the door. “I look forward to seeing it.”

“As do I,” murmured Vettel, placing the stone on her workbench and shrugging off her jacket. “Leave that shit for now, Foske! Get me the cleaving blade and dress the wire for some sawing!”

The bell tinkled and Bronkhorst came bundling down the steps into the shop so fast he nearly fell at the bottom, sweat on his forehead and his hair in disarray. “Show me what you have!” he wheezed, once he’d managed to catch his breath.

Sontice frowned over. “By way of diamonds?”

“Yes by way of fucking diamonds, what do I come here for, custard?”

“What sort of stones are you after—”

“All sorts! Get it all out, man!”

Sontice wondered what was going on. The Royal Jeweller was not normally a man to get into a flap. “You speak as if it’s a matter of urgency—”

“You could bloody well say that! You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?”

“The king!”

“Ordered some new cufflinks, has he?”

“He fucking died!”

Sontice stared, his mouth slightly open, his palms slightly prickling. “Well that’s awful news.” He cleared his throat as he glanced towards the Union flag in the corner, a little dusty, if he was honest. “As a patriot…terrible news.”

“Terrible,” agreed Bronkhorst. “Terrible.” A nervous smile was quivering at the corner of his lips as he leaned close to murmur. “But… I think you and I might perceive an upside.”

“You mean…” Sontice could hardly bring himself to whisper the words. “New crown?”

Bronkhorst’s voice was all squeaky breath with excitement. “New crown, new chain, new regalia, new bloody everything!”

“New everything?”

“Lord Bayaz himself made the commission! Attended the fitting, in person. He wants it modern. New styles, new stones, new cuts. He told me money was no object.”

“No object?” squeaked Sontice.

“He said, and I’m quoting the First of the bloody Magi here, you understand, he said, ‘give it a big arsed diamond.’”

Sontice felt the smile spread across his face. He had been in two minds about that stone. Something like that, so rare, so hard to move. He’d cursed his folly after Breyer talked him into it. But now, oh, serendipity, just two days later he was perceiving the fucking upside. He locked the door to the shop, he beckoned Bronkhorst into the back room, he breathlessly knelt beside the safe.

“Do I…” he murmured as he spun the wheel, “have just the thing for you…”

“Your Majesty looks…truly regal,” observed Bronkhorst, padding down from the stepladder and gazing obsequiously into the mirror.

Everyone looks at least a bit regal wearing a crown, of course. If one could manage to ignore the glittering mass of gold and jewels on his head Prince Orso, who was of course King Orso now, looked, in fact, tired, worried, and rather dubious as he considered his own reflection. “You are far too kind…” He squeezed his eyes shut as though making a huge effort, then his shoulders sagged. “I’m sorry, what was your name again?”

“Villem dan Bronkhorst, your Majesty,” said Bronkhorst, giving yet another bow. It would probably have been easier if he remained continuously bent double while in the palace. “It was, as it happens, my father who made your father’s crown. It was an immense honour for him, as this is an immense honour for me.” And he bowed again. “One might say, for a jeweller, it is a crowning achievement.”

The joke proved to be a significant misjudgement. The new king was lost in sad contemplation of his own crowned reflection, while Lord Bayaz narrowed his eyes slightly as if he had suddenly caught the odour of piss. Bronkhorst bowed once more, cleared his throat, and drifted backwards across the wide salon, his footsteps echoing in the gilded space above.

“I have been thinking about my father’s death,” murmured the king.

“Of course,” said Bayaz, approaching the mirror and placing a fatherly hand on the king’s shoulder. “The entire nation is in mourning.”

“But…does it not seem strange to you? The manner of it?”

Bayaz raised one brow. “Arch Lector Glokta conducted a thorough investigation. There were no indications of foul play.”

“But he was young. He was hearty. Why, just a week or two before we were fencing together!”

“Your Majesty, when a great man dies, it is tempting to think it can only be the result of some great event, some grand conspiracy, some towering malevolence.” Bayaz adjusted the fall of Orso’s cloak ever so slightly. “It would be a reassurance, in a way, to feel that death follows such meaningful patterns. But the hard truth is that great men die of the same things little ones do. Sometimes they slip and strike their heads, sometimes they choke on a fish bone, and sometimes they pass peacefully in the night, for no particular reason. When they do so, it is, in a way, a mercy. We should all be so lucky as to die in an unspectacular fashion.”

“I suppose so,” said the prince, snatching the crown from his head and frowning down at it. “But can we really afford a coronation? I understand the treasury is…a little light.”

“The Banking House of Valint and Balk have agreed to provide.”

“Borrowing the money to pay for a new crown seems like rather over-heavy symbolism—”

“But it is the modern age, and the relics of the past will simply not do.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Orso took a heavy breath and set the crown on its cushion. Several hundred sleepless hours of work for Bronkhorst and his assistants. “Thank you for all your efforts…” He squeezed his eyes shut again, then burst out angrily. “By the fucking Fates what was your name?”

“Bronkhorst, your Majesty,” said Bronkhorst, bowing even further than usual.

“Yes, yes. So sorry, I’m all over the bloody place at the moment.”

“Your Majesty has no need…to apologise…” But his Majesty was already striding towards the door.

One would have thought one might relax when the High King of the Union left the room, but the First of the Magi managed to make Bronkhorst feel more panicked than ever, standing with arms folded and brow furrowed, considering the crowning achievement of Bronkhorst’s career as a royal cook might consider spoiled meat.

The silence stretched until Bronkhorst could bear it no longer. “Magnificent, is it not, my Lord? I was saying to my assistant earlier that I have never seen such a radiant stone—”

“Honestly, I find the stone somewhat…disappointing.”

Bronkhorst swallowed. They say only diamond can cut diamond, but he began to think the disapproval of the First of the Magi might have been capable of the feat as well. “It is a superior cut, Lord Bayaz,” he stammered out, “a thoroughly modern cut and a flawless polish, the result of new grinding techniques…” By the Fates, he was trembling. He could feel the sweat springing from his forehead. “It is of a size with the principal stones of any previous crown—”

“People expect progress.” Bayaz leaned close and Bronkhorst was forced to shrink away as he carefully pronounced each word. “Find…a bigger one.”

The Point

“And here we are,” said Swift, hopping down from the hoist. He wasn’t at all what one might have expected from an Inquisitor. A jovial man, prone to backslapping, with ruddy cheeks and an easy laugh. He had seemed quaint, even a little absurd, back in Jesper’s office in Ostenhorm. Those cheeks were just as ruddy and that laugh just as easy down here in the mine, in the darkness. But in these surroundings they somehow became more troubling than any amount of glaring menace.

It was a large cave. A natural gallery, perhaps. No doubt the ceiling was low, further in, as the tunnels wormed like grasping tentacles into the seam. So low the prisoners would have to work lying on their sides. But here near the entrance it was so high it became a mere rumour in the echoing darkness. The hooded lamps were turned down to a flicker as a precaution against explosive gases, and the place smelled like a burial. Or no, far worse: an exhumation.

Those few puddles of light crawled with people. If you could call them that. The ragged ghosts of men, women and children; emaciated, filthy, crooked, lurching lop-sided. Guards stood over them. Black-masked Practicals, sticks in their fists. Most of the workers did not look up, lost in their own misery. Only one woman met Jesper’s gaze. Black eyes, faintly gleaming, behind tangled hair, in a face so pale and pinched it hardly seemed alive. What was it in that look, that he could hardly bear to meet it? Jesper had seen poverty, in the slums of Adua and Valbeck, considered himself quite the connoisseur of depredation, but this was something more.

It was oddly quiet. No bawdy work songs, like the ones Jesper had heard at other iron mines in Angland, where the labourers were—at least in theory—free to leave. The rickety rattle of mine carts. The clink and clatter of ore loaded and unloaded. Somewhere the spatter of falling water. Someone’s wheezing, crackling breath. The silence of exhaustion. Or of terror. Or perhaps, exiled to this freezing hell, they had lost the power of speech. Become crooked, burrowing animals. Become machines for mining, that happened to be made from meat.

Inquisitor Swift smiled as he swept an arm at the great subterranean chamber with the flourish of a theatre impresario. “What do you think?”

Jesper hardly knew how to reply. His sister Tilde often accused him of talking too much, but words seemed to have failed him for a moment. He was not sure what he had expected. Something like this, perhaps, if he had thought about it. But nothing could have prepared him for seeing it…seeing them.

“Striking,” he managed to mumble.

“Here’s the product.” Inquisitor Swift plucked a lump of ore from a heap beside the hoist and tossed it over. Jesper barely had the presence of mind to catch it. “Reasonable quality. Been getting better lately, in fact. Think we’re hitting a good seam, further in.” Further in. To this buried hell. Where the ceilings became lower, then lower yet. The very idea made Jesper feel queasy. “We produce maybe twenty tons on a good day, but if you need more we can run night shifts too. There’s no shortage of labour.”

“How many…” Jesper cleared his throat, fumbling for the right word. Inmates? Convicts? Slaves? “…workers do you have?”

“Three or four hundred. More than usual, right now. Lot of Breakers coming in. And accomplices of the Breakers. Family members, associates, so on. But the numbers always fall in the winter.”

“You release convicts in the winter…?”

Swift gave that easy laugh. The same one he had so readily given to the feeblest of Jesper’s jokes in Ostenhorm. “Releases are quite rare. It’s the cold that thins them out.”

Jesper wanted to swallow, but somehow it was difficult to get the right amount of spit into the right place, and he ended up awkwardly choking on it.

Tilde had said it was a bad idea to get into business with the Inquisition. He’d thought she meant on account of the dreary bureaucracy, and the stolid complacency, and the low-quality men of no imagination, like Swift. It had never occurred to him that she might have some moral objection. Morals had never really been among his conscious considerations when it came to business. Or, honestly, to much of his life. He liked to congratulate himself on being rather ruthless and cutthroat. A privateer on the high seas of commerce! Partnered with Savine dan Glokta, hadn’t he, when he saw money to be made, and she regularly indulged in practices that would scandalise a priest, outrage a judge and make a pirate blush. But now he started to suspect, with an odd and slightly sweaty creeping feeling across the back, that most people had a moral line, after all. One they could not even see until they blundered past it. And he might have unwittingly strayed onto the wrong side of his.

“Touch of nausea?” asked Swift. “Entirely normal, don’t worry. The air down here takes some getting used to.” And he clapped Jesper warmly on the back. “But you do get used to it. Quicker than you’d think.”

“Absolutely. The air.” Jesper tossed the lump of ore back onto the heap and slapped the dust from his hands, then whipped out his kerchief and rubbed away the remainder.

He rather feared the memories of the place might not be so easily wiped away. But he had satisfied himself that it all made excellent sense from a business standpoint. The foundries always needed more ore and the papers were already signed. If there was one thing worse than making a contract with the Inquisition, it was breaking one.

“I believe I’ve seen enough.” He tore his eyes from those unfortunate ghosts in the half-light, and forced a smile. “Let’s go.”

“Woah there!” roared Smolof, over the clanging of the forge hammers turning out the half blooms, eyes narrowed against the glare as the crucible swung gently into place. “And pour it!”

Canter hauled on the chain, hand over hand, its rattle hardly heard over the grinding of the great rollers at the other end of the foundry floor, and Smolof felt himself smile as the crucible slowly tipped.

In his father’s day they’d had to cook the iron and charcoal for a week, then bundle it and heat it and hammer-forge it into shear steel, all by hand. But with this new clay and these new water-powered bellows they could get the furnaces far hotter. Crucible steel, they were calling it, took a tenth of the time and came out twice the quality, with every man in his crew earning twice what they used to, with a bonus on top if they got past a dozen ingots an hour.

“There it is,” said Smolof, smiling wider as he watched that white hot stream, flame puffing as it hit the sand in the mould. All the men’s smiling faces lit by the heat of it, the power of it. “That’s progress, right there, you bastards! Can you feel it?” They’d had a Gurkish fellow working with ’em, for a month or two, and he’d said it was like looking in the face of God. “We’re making the future, every time we fill a mold!”

He waved towards the gleam of daylight, the doors where they were loading bar iron onto a wagon for the trip to Ostenhorm. “That’ll be pillars in a new warehouse, boilers in a new factory, axles on a new wagon, but this grey gold here, that’ll be springs in the town clock, needles for the dressmakers, the guts o’ those new weaving machines in Valbeck!”

“Some fucker’s cutlery!” said Canter, wiping his sweaty forehead on the back of his long glove.

“Wire in some rich lady’s corset!” called Ridge, sticking his chin in the air and his chest at the ceiling, and the lads whooped and clapped.

“Swords!” said Salmon, grin white in his soot-smeared face. “And swords, eh?

And that was all it took to snatch Smolof back to Styria. The feel of the hilt in his hand, sticky with sweat. The blood he could never quite scrub out of the basketwork. The jostling pressure all around him, the clamour of screams, and his own breath echoing in his helmet. His own breath and his own endless, mindless swearing. The taste of metal in his mouth. Had to work his tongue around. Felt like he could taste it now, somehow. “Aye,” he muttered, “and swords.”

The shriek of the bearings as they wheeled that mould away, already cooling to an angry orange, shook him free of it, like he had to be shaken free ten times a day. He slapped Salmon on the back and got to shouting again. “Right, then, girls, are we on a fucking break? Bring up the next mould, eh? We’ve a new world to build!”

“We use only the very best materials, of course,” said Zuri, as she led them on into the guts of the building. Fettel had to confess there was something exciting about the ever-strengthening throb of machinery that seemed to rise from the very stones and set her scalp tingling beneath her wig. “The King’s Own and the Army of Angland are our most significant clients, but we also have buyers in Styria, have recently secured a sizeable order from associates in the Old Empire, and are in negotiations with agents in Dagoska too.”

One of the gentlemen snorted. “So you sell weapons to every side of every war?”

Zuri might have been a glorified lady’s maid, but the servants of powerful people can become powerful in themselves. A Lady Governor’s lady’s maid was no one to be sniffed at. Especially not this one, Fettel suspected. Her composure was as steely as the weapons they turned out in this armoury. “Her Grace Lady Savine would no doubt observe—and she apologises profusely that she cannot be here—that a willingness to sell to every available client is the essence of the arms trade. If that is a problem, I fear you may be touring the wrong manufactory.” A ripple of polite laughter, and the gentleman retreated flushing into his high collar.

Fettel wished she was looking to invest. But what she was really after was a good match for her sister. Money is drawn to money, which made any concern in which Savine dan Brock had a share a powerful magnet for wealthy men. She took another careful glance over her fan at the prospects she had identified. The bony fellow with the carefully arranged hair was Lord Sempter. An awful bore, by all accounts, but exceedingly rich. His title had been paid for with new money, but that settles the same debts as the old kind. Fettel had heard he lost his wife last year and might be in the market for a thoroughbred—someone who could mix her pedigree with his money to make a highly respectable alloy. Fettel’s family had breeding. They had too much bloody breeding, if anything. They had breeding coming out of their arses.

It was cash they needed.

Zuri swung a pair of double doors open, the whining of machinery instantly redoubling. “This is the grinding room, where blades are finished.”

There were a few impressed-sounding grunts even from this hard-nosed audience. There must have been thousands of weapons in that huge, iron-skeletoned space, all ranged upon identical racks with the strict discipline of elite soldiers on a parade ground. A good two dozen workmen were gathered about a spinning drive-shaft that cut through the midst, working at the water-powered grinding wheels, every man sending his own shower of sparks as he milled a murderous edge onto each blade.

Zuri even made pointing out racks of weapons seem superbly elegant as she led the investors across the armoury floor. “Horseman’s axes on your left, infantry swords over there, and this is a new pattern knife for cannon crew, forged in modern crucible steel from a foundry here in Angland.”

One might have called them daggers, Fettel supposed, but they were almost short-swords, with a slender blade as long as her forearm. There was no adornment whatsoever. A truly industrial weapon, turned out by machine, each identical to the last, and yet there was something beautiful in their stripped-down functionality.

“Might I…hold one?” she found she had asked.

Zuri nodded as though the request was entirely routine. But then her composure was such that, had a meteor crashed through the ceiling behind her, she would probably not even have flinched. “Of course.”

“By the Fates…” murmured Fettel, lifting one gently from the rack. For some reason she felt the need to treat it with the reverence of some holy relic. She raised a brow at Lord Sempter, and gave a little laugh. “It’s so light.”

She had expected something so deadly to be hard to lift, but it was shockingly easy. She was acutely aware with how little effort she could have turned to the plump old gentleman beside her and sliced open his guts. She felt powerful, somehow, holding it. Frighteningly powerful.

It seemed as if there might be the slightest arch in one of Zuri’s black brows. As if she knew exactly what Fettel was thinking. “Keep that one, by all means.”

“Really?”

Zuri gestured towards the dozens upon dozens of identical blades. “We have more.”

“What kind of investment is the Lady Governor expecting?” grunted a gentleman whose monocle kept falling out.

“Ten thousand marks at a minimum, but she expects returns to be swift.”

Fettel carefully scanned the company, judging how they reacted to the figure. Judging what each man might be worth.

“She guarantees it?” someone asked.

“Her grace is not in the guarantees business, but she would observe that there are few safer bets than weapons.”

“Even in peacetime?” asked Fettel, weighing that knife thoughtfully in her hand.

Zuri gave the slightest smile. “What better time to rearm? Now. Let me show you the cannon.”

“We’re here for…” Sarlby frowned at the woman, standing slightly bent over with one hand clutching at the corner of the desk, something like an animal at bay. “What was the name again?”

It was left to Bremer to cast an eye over the warrant, since he was the only one of ’em who could read. “Fettel dan Sarova, denounced by her brother-in-law Lord Sempter, accused of profiteering, speculation and conspiracy to—”

“The usual,” grunted Sparks, stepping towards her.

Sarlby had yet to find a formula for how a given person would react when they were taken. Most went meek, but a few reasoned, and a very few raged. This one turned out a rager.

“Get out, damn you!” she screeched, going for Sparks and scratching at him with her nails. He flung her off and she hit the wall hard. Her head smashed the window, glass tinkling, and she crumpled on the threadbare Gurkish carpet.

“Do you have to?” said Sarlby, propping his hands on his hips. Judge didn’t like it when a prisoner turned up bloody. Punishment is for the court, she’d always say, with that frown that makes your small hairs prickle.

Sparks was rubbing at the faint mark on his cheek. “Bitch scratched me.”

“Punishment is for the court.” And Sarlby wagged a finger just the way Judge did. Found himself doing just what Judge did a lot, these days.

He used to think everyone had some bad and some good in ’em, and the struggle was to bring folk over to your side. Then he saw the corpses of his friends swinging in their cages above the road to Valbeck. Yesterday, Judge had said, offhand, “The niceties of nuance and compromise are for those with no world to change,” and he saw that she was right. Folk were either on the right side or the wrong, and the wrong had to be got rid of. Every one you weeded out made the world a better place. That was the sad truth.

“You bastards,” the woman was gasping, half-way between a snarl and a sob, breathing hard on her hands and knees with blood creeping down her face from the hairline. “You bastards.”

Sarlby sighed. “You do good for the good, not for the thanks. Let’s go.”

Luvonte puffed his cheeks out and started shackling her hands. Behind her, since she was one of the ragers. Then Sparks grabbed her under the armpit, made her squeal as he dragged her up, then gasp as he shoved her into the corridor, catching her shoulder on the doorframe so she blundered face first into the wall beyond.

“Punishment is for the Court!” Sarlby called after him as he bundled her down the corridor, slowly shaking his head. That was when his eye caught on the knife. Strange thing to have in a lady’s study. Not far shy of a short-sword, fine steel gleaming. A weapon of war, new-forged and never used, by the look of it, except as a paperweight, lying on top of a stack of deeds and documents.

Seemed strange, now, how respectful they’d been, to begin with. Knocked on doors, rather than just kicking them in. Wiped their feet ’fore they crossed the threshold. Ever so sorry, my lord, but you’ve been asked for at the Court of the People, by all means finish your toast first. Put things back, if they got knocked over. Made sure to lock up after themselves. ’Cause they were doing the work o’ the righteous and needed to disport themselves accordingly and, you know, the place should be right in case the accused came back to it, found innocent. But that hardly ever happened these days, and the lists to be picked up got longer and longer. Now they just tramped through like farmers snatching pigs from a pen. Dragged folk out by the hair leaving muddy bootprints everywhere and stuffed them shoulder to shoulder in the wagon. Something caught your eye on the way these days you just took it. Why not? Wasn’t like the accused would need it again.

So Sarlby tucked that fine knife in his belt and turned for the door, since they had a lot of names to get through. A chilly gust through the broken window took the papers it had sat on and started to scatter them about the room, settling like leaves in autumn.

“And here we are,” said the one called Sparks, swinging open the door with the flourish of a lion-tamer revealing the beast. “Out you come.”

It wasn’t that Jesper refused to go through, it was just that his legs seemed extremely reluctant to step onto the roof.

“I…” he muttered, “I…” His sister Tilde always accused him of saying too much but at that moment, perhaps unsurprisingly, words failed him.

“Out you go,” said the one called Sarlby. Jesper felt a sudden jabbing pain between his shoulder blades. The man had produced a huge knife and poked him with its point. But there was little time for outrage as he stumbled from the staircase onto the roof of the Tower of Chains, the high breeze chilling his sweaty face, plucking at his hair.

The city was spread out before them, hazy through the swirling specks of snow. The roofs all white from it. The streets black between them. Columns of grubby smoke rose from the chimneys. From a fire still burning over in the Arches. It had been burning for days. It was getting to the point that people hardly bothered to put them out. It might have been a beautiful sight at another time. Before the Great Change. But like Inquisitor Swift’s ready chuckle, how it came across was all about the circumstances. Now, it needed hardly to be said, it was horrifying.

“I’m innocent!” mumbled Jesper. He was not dressed for the bitter cold and his teeth were starting to chatter. “I’m an innocent man!”

“Are you though?” asked Sarlby, with a quizzical brow raised, that knife still in his hand. “Way I heard it, you were in business with the Inquisition.”

“Buying ore from a penal colony,” said Sparks.

“Folk imprisoned over nothing, and starved, and frozen, and worked to death for your profits.”

The irony was that Jesper had seen Swift himself, only a few days before, alive and apparently healthy in the uniform of the People’s Inspectorate, herding prisoners into the cells with that very same good humour with which he had brutalised convicts or discussed business in Jesper’s office in Ostenhorm. Jesper had called out desperately to him, an arm straining through the bars of his cage. Swift had not slapped his back then, it needed hardly to be said. He had looked straight past as if he did not recognise him. Perhaps he hadn’t.

“I had no idea,” Jesper was blathering, his wobbling knees refusing once again to move. “I mean, the contracts were already signed by the time I knew! Please believe me! I never meant to hurt any—”

“Look, friend, we do dozens o’ these a day.” Jesper gasped as Sarlby pricked him with the point of that dagger, made him stumble across the roof like a horse given the spur. “It’s hard to say and it’s harder to hear,” another prick in the small of the back, “but the truth is we don’t give a shit what you did and still less what you meant by it.”

That great big man glared at Jesper with those furious eyes, seeming tiny behind his lenses. “Judge says guilty,” he grunted. “That’s that.” And he took a little sip from his flask.

Jesper’s legs really did not want to step onto the box beside the parapet, but another prick of that knife in his left buttock and he was up there in a trice. Astonishing, how a piece of sharp metal can cut so quickly through such deep objections.

“It was a mistake,” he said. More of a whimper, really, as the toes of his shoes shuffled over the brink and the city below blurred through his tears. “It was—”

“Let’s go,” said Sarlby. Jesper felt the point of that knife jab him in the back, one more time, and he really couldn’t help stepping forward.

The Great Change

The House of Questions, Spring 591

“This is the new dress, is it?” asked Glokta.

“It is.” Savine frowned down at herself, and sighed. “I suppose it will do.” She struck an apparently careless pose which she had no doubt practised for hours in the mirror. She does nothing by accident, after all. “What do you think?”

Ardee had told him, with evident pride, that Savine had selected the fabric herself, and specified the cut herself, and terrorised an entire team of seamstresses for three days in person. And woe betide the one who put a stitch out of place.

“As a noted connoisseur of lady’s tailoring…” Glokta twisted his face discerningly. “I would not wear it to court.”

Her face fell a little. “No?”

“It would never do to so thoroughly outshine Queen Terez herself.”

Savine pushed her tongue into her cheek. “Hmmm.” She tried not to show how delighted she was with his approval, and he tried not to show how delighted he was with her delight. At times he would catch glimpses of the child she had been. And almost want to weep that she is a child no more. And immediately aferward would see the woman she was fast becoming. And be choked with pride at all she might achieve.

Ah, the curse and the blessing of parenthood, that can coax a sentimental tear from the pitiless eye of even a monster like me. It felt strange, in a way, to have her in his stark office. Filling this place of death and pain and bloodless paperwork with hope, and beauty, and potential. It was frightening, even, to have her so near to the cells below. And to think, I was once a man with nothing to lose.

He had to clear a lump in his throat. “I’ve no doubt you will make a passable dressmaker, in due course.”

“I’ve no doubt I will make several marvellous ones.” She ran a careless finger across the map of the Union on the table top. To which I once nailed an inconvenient rival. “But for my own career I am aiming somewhat higher.”

“Mind you don’t aim so high you topple backwards. In that dress you could probably never get up.”

“It is for that sort of thing that one must employ dependable servants.” She ran a fastidious finger across the top of one of the many tottering heaps of documents. “A lady of taste should appear to make no effort. The right things simply…” and she blew a tuft of dust from the tip, “happen around her.”

“I believe the last time we spoke you were deciding between being a fencing champion, an architect or a queen.”

“Why not all three?” she asked, regarding him down her nose. “I am firmly of the opinion that there are no limits for a woman in the modern world, if she has enough friends and enough money.”

“By the Fates,” murmured Glokta. “Fourteen years old, and you have the secret of life already.”

“It is the responsibility of an only child to pour all their energies into surpassing their parents.”

“You are well on your way to equalling your mother in wits.” He licked a finger and smoothed one of his eyebrows. “At this rate you might even manage to surpass your father in looks.”

“You know I love you, Father, but you are infamously hideous.”

He grinned, showing his empty gums, a sight she always found thoroughly amusing. “It may surprise you to learn that I was once a celebrated beauty.” And it will certainly surprise you to learn that I am also not your father. It hovered, on the tip of his tongue, as it did so often. My old enemy, the truth. More hated even than steps. She will have to know. He knew that she would have to know. But will she smile at me the same way, afterward? Will she laugh at my jokes, and talk of her hopes, and be the spur that pushes me onwards? Will I still have a daughter? He had his doubts.

I am protecting her. I am preparing her. I am making the world she deserves. Why, watching her swan about the room, so utterly dauntless, so beautifully composed, the excuses almost made themselves. Just as they always do. Don’t I deserve something for myself, after all? I have been keeping the truth waiting all my life. It will wait a little longer. Besides, his daughter’s ever-busy mind was already on her next triumph.

“Well,” she said, pulling on gloves which, of course, perfectly matched her shoes. “Tomorrow’s celebrated beauties have better things to do than loiter in gloomy offices.”

“Of course,” murmured Glokta. “All that money and all those friends will not make themselves.”

She blew him a kiss over her shoulder. “Don’t work too hard.”

As she opened the door, Superior Pike was in the anteroom, just raising a fist to knock. He delivered a terribly grave formal bow. “Lady Savine, an absolute honour.”

“Superior Pike, an unqualified privilege.” And she gave a curtsy that was somehow both perfectly ladylike and crushingly sarcastic at once, before sweeping away in a whirl of expensive skirts.

“By the Fates,” murmured Pike, frowning after her. “If something is not done she will rule the world.”

“By next year, if it keeps to her timetable.” Glokta grimaced as he caught the edge of the desk and hauled himself to his feet so he could reach the decanter. I swear it gets harder every time. “Shut the door, would you?” And he began to pour two glasses. The way Arch Lector Sult once poured a glass for me…

“Excellent work in Starikland, my friend.” He nudged a drink towards Pike. “As always. The rebels are seen off and the Near Country is bound tighter to the Union. You pull our undeserving arses from the fire again.”

“Well.” Pike swirled the spirit around for a moment, frowning into his glass. “I know how it feels in the fire.”

“Which is why I remain so particularly grateful that you continue to brave it on my behalf.” He gritted his teeth as he inched his way back into his chair, legs burning. If you can call them legs. He had to drop the last few inches to the leather with an undignified gasp.

“I serve and obey, your Eminence, always.” Pike watched him, without apparent emotion. “But I think the time has come for us both to retire, and commit ourselves full-time to our memoirs.” There was a brief pause. Then they burst out laughing together. Pike’s laugh was an unlovely thing. A kind of papery gurgle. But I have spent many years deriving pride and pleasure from unlovely things.

“Glad to see you still have your sense of humour.” Glokta bared his ruined teeth at the twinge in his back as he leaned forwards. “You may need it where you’re going.”

Pike raised one largely hairless brow in a silent question.

“Valbeck,” said Glokta. “I want you to take charge of the Inquisition there.”

Pike raised that brow a little higher. Never use a word, when quiet will do the job.

“The city is growing at a furious pace. New mills, new ways of working, new workers too, flooding in from the countryside. There are signs they are becoming…organised.”

“One cannot stop progress.” Pike gave a sigh. “It’s happening everywhere. You want me to break them up?”

Glokta paused, his mouth slightly open. Here is the moment, then. Once the words are said, there can be no going back. But it is hardly the first time I have gambled everything. He glanced towards the door. I must make the world she deserves. “No,” he said. “I want you to encourage them.”

Pike’s only expression of surprise was another slow movement of that brow. Glokta greatly enjoyed his cold-bloodedness. Great Euz could crash through the doors behind and he would probably not even bother to turn.

“I want you to give them shape,” said Glokta, “and structure, and purpose. I want you to make them effective. I want you to give them a name, even. One cannot have a good movement without a good name. I had been thinking…of the Breakers.”

“It has a certain ring. And tell me—is this a way to keep our little enemies close? Or a way…” And he dropped his voice ever so slightly. “To move against our greater enemy?”

“At first the former.” Glokta could not help a little shiver down his spine. Could not help lowering his own voice almost to a whisper. Even I. “Perhaps…in time…with the right precautions well in place…the latter.”

“I have often thought it would be a fine thing…” Pike drained his glass, and placed it carefully back on the desk with a click. “To leave the world better than we found it.”

“If we truly are to change things at all…it must be a Great Change. If we are to make a better future, we must rip the past up by the roots. We must rip him out by the roots. The banks, the bureaucracy, the crown. We must remake it all.”

Pike slowly nodded. “One cannot build a shining tower on rotten foundations. Will you involve the king?”

Glokta gave a sad little smile. “His Majesty’s heart is in the right place but I fear his guts will never be up to the task. Not to defy his master. Not to make the sacrifices that will be necessary.” And the sacrifices…will be many. “We must be as patient, and as determined, and as ruthless as our enemy.”

Pike looked back evenly at him. “Not qualities that you have ever lacked, your Eminence.”

“Nor you, my friend.” Glokta emptied his own glass, and frowned towards the window. Into the little garden outside, just beginning to bud. “Sometimes, to change the world…we must first burn it down.”

Valbeck, Autumn 593

They had given her quite the beating.

Her face was mottled with bruises, one eye was swollen nearly shut, her tangle of orange hair was black in patches from clotted blood and there were two neat red streaks down her top lip from her broken nose. But Pike had seen far worse. It was widely suspected she had killed that Practical found in the sewers so, if anything, he considered them to have been unusually forbearing.

“So,” he said, sitting in the chair opposite her. “Your name is…?”

She leaned forward as far as her chains would allow, curled her tongue, and blew bloody spit across the table in front of him.

Pike raised his brows. “What a lovely name.”

His face being what it was—or what it wasn’t—he was not quite included in humanity these days. He stood always a little apart. An object of fear, scorn or pity. That distance gave him clarity. That distance, and all the things he had seen. In the wars, and in the camps, and in the rebellion in Starikland. Humanity at its worst. Humanity with so little human about it.

People thought themselves each special, each so wonderfully different. But they were, in the main, so horribly predictable once real pressure was applied. Their little needs, their little wants, their little greeds, their little loves. Few people truly worried him, these days. Truly…interested him.

After a beating such as she had received prisoners were generally rendered pliable, but it was not unusual to see them go the other way, and rant and spit and fume. So the fury in her bruised and swollen face was unremarkable, the spit and defiance entirely familiar, often seen when the questioning began. But as Pike looked into her eyes he saw something there. Or…he saw something was missing, perhaps.

Conscience? Fear? Pity? He thought he recognised its absence. From those rare moments when he dared to look in the mirror.

He placed his elbows on the table top, and clasped his hands. “I am Superior Pike.”

“You look like a fucking overdone ham,” she snarled at him.

Pike gave a little snort. He turned slowly to look at Inquisitor Risinau, loitering nervously in the corner of the room. “Well, I can hardly deny it,” he murmured, before turning back to the prisoner. “And you can hardly deny…” He glanced over the blood-dotted paperwork before him. “The murder of a manufactory owner—”

“Cut his throat from behind,” she said.

“And his son—”

“Stove his skull in with a shaping hammer,” she said.

“Not to mention the setting of a fire which gutted not only that building but two others.”

“You should’ve seen the bastard burn,” she said.

“Then you are suspected of killing one Practical Stone while he attempted to arrest you—”

“I hid a needle in my sleeve. When he tried to put the irons on me I stuck it in his eye. When he went down I put a pick-axe through him.” Pike thought he heard Risinau give a little squeak of disgust. “And there’s more. There’s lots more.”

“A great deal of bloody work, for a woman of your size.”

“Oh, I’ve never been scared o’ work,” she said, showing her pink-stained teeth. “And I don’t regret a bit of it. They deserved it, every one.”

“What honest man could disagree?” said Pike, sitting back. “Users. Profiteers. Maggots grown fat on the still-living corpses of the working folk. What have you really done but to seek justice? When the corrupt state, and the corrupt courts, and the corrupt system denied it to you, you have taken it with your own hands. I understand it. I even, believe it or not…applaud it.”

The fury had gone out of her face. Now she frowned at him, suspicious, her split lips wrinkled with scorn. A canny customer, being offered a deal they refused to believe. “What do you know about justice?”

“Look at me!” He threw up his hands. “I look like an overdone ham.” Oh, the indescribable pain, then the horror, then the bitterness when he had received these burns. But he had come to think of them as a gift. The pain had been the pain of rebirth. To change a thing you must first burn it down, and the snivelling wretch he once was had been burned down so he could rebuild himself as the man he was now. Down the years he had made of his ruined face a shield no terror and no pity could pierce. A weapon that could cow the strong and crush the weak with a glance. Pike turned towards Risinau, looking more worried than ever, and waved a hand towards his own face. “Do you know where I received…this?”

Risinau swallowed, thoroughly unnerved. He was an odd choice, in many ways, for an Inquisitor. Too little spine and too much imagination. But one must work with the tools one has, as the Arch Lector was so fond of saying. “In the camps, sir…as I understand it…”

“Yes. In the camps. I have come to believe that the heart of a society is revealed in its prisons.” Pike gestured at the room. “In its justice or its…injustice.” He leaned forward, fixing the prisoner’s strangely empty eye with his own. “You may not have spent time in the camps, but you see it nonetheless. The heart of the Union is rotten. That rot must be cut away. It must be burned out. And you can help me.”

She glared over at Risinau, who quickly looked away, then she glared back at Pike, who did not. “I don’t believe you.”

“If you could be so easily made to believe, what use would you be? All I ask is that you allow me to prove it. Gather like-minded people. I think you have a spark in you that others will follow. Collect the hurt, and the disposessed, and help settle their scores. Strike blows for the common man. Spill blood. Set fires.”

“Burn?” she murmured.

“Yes. Give it a little theatre. We will talk more, about the right methods. About the right targets. I will help you, where I can, but…try to be cleverer. Not only wrathful, but also discerning. You are no fool. It does not help our cause if you behave like one. You cannot help usher in the Great Change if you are caught.”

“The Great Change…” She swallowed, muscles shifting in her rash-speckled throat. “Where would I start?”

“Didn’t I say I wanted us to be free?” Pike stood, looking down at her. “I have no interest in bringing down the old masters, only to set myself up in their place.” He slid the key into the lock on her manacles. “Where should you start?” He held her eye as he turned it. “You be the judge.”

“You’re letting her go?” squeaked Risinau, as they stepped out into the hallway.

“I am doing much more than that,” said Pike. “I am making her useful. I sense she could be very useful, in due course.”

“So…it is a scheme? She will be the bait in a trap? You will use her to expose more traitors?”

Pike opened the next door. “We work in the shadows.” Another interrogation room, just the same as the last. They were always the same. The bare white walls, not quite clean, the scarred table with the two chairs. “In our business, we get used to the idea that nothing is as it seems and everything pretends to be something else.” He sat in the questioner’s chair. “Paranoia and suspicion are tools of our trade, but, sometimes…a rock is just a rock. Please sit.”

Risinau swallowed as he glanced at the other chair. The one meant for the prisoner. The significance was not lost on him. It was not lost on anyone, ever. But what choice did he have?

“I have been watching you, Inquisitor Risinau,” said Pike. “For some months now. Ever since I took charge in Valbeck, indeed.”

Risinau’s tongue darted over his lips.

“In spite of your efforts at secrecy—which could, frankly, use some work—I know what you have been doing. Overlooking minor infringements. Releasing several men thought guilty of fomenting strikes. And, of course, more recently, collaborating with a one-time informant of yours by the name of Collem Sibalt to organise workers, print seditious pamphlets, and mount secret meetings at which the very principles of the Union are attacked. Have I left anything out?”

Risinau was a far more predictable interrogee than the woman had been. His soft face had drained of all colour. “I… I can explain.”

“Really, there’s no need. For many years I have been searching—patiently, carefully—for like-minded people. People who might help me bring about a Great Change. No less a thing than a change in the government of the Union. A change in the order of things. A change in the nature of the world.”

Risinau’s scared eyes seem to gleam a little at the words, but there was still so much fear there, so much suspicion.

“I know you will find it hard to believe,” said Pike, “but I told that woman nothing but the truth. Ask yourself this. If I truly was the ruthless oppressor I appear to be—would you and she not be dangling together at the end of two ropes?” Pike came the closest he could to a smile. “All I ask is that you allow me to prove it.”

Risinau blinked at him. “I never dared hope…that you might be an ally—”

“Then you must learn to hope more. I could point you towards some interesting theory, on how society could be restructured, to suit the needs of all. Have you read the treatises of Livonte, who established the Affoian communes?”

Risinau stared at him wide-eyed. “I did not know any copies survived!”

“You must open your eyes to what is possible.” And Pike slid those battered little books from his coat and pushed them across the table top. “Your ambitions must become limitless.” Risinau dug the first volume open, leafing through the pages with eager fingers. “You must read the works of Farans and Verturio, certain passages from Bialoveld, even.”

“That proponent of exploitation?” asked Risinau, glancing up.

“One must know one’s enemy.” Pike stood, his chair screeching on the tiles, and came slowly around the table. “It is not enough to hate the old system, or even to bring it down. One must have plans for what will follow. How we might set the people free, my friend, make them all equal. If we are to make a better world…” Pike nodded towards the cell where he had just spoken with the red-haired murderer. “We must give them something to fear.” He placed a gentle hand on Risinau’s shoulder. “And we must give them something to believe in.”

Valbeck, Summer 599

Sibalt had been sitting on a crate as Risinau walked in, thumbing through one of those ridiculous fantasies he liked to read. Now he slid down and walked over, grinning. “Well, well. Superior Risinau.”

Risinau gently stroked the badges of rank newly sewn onto his collar. “You cannot know how it pains me to wear the uniform of oppression,” he said. “But if it can be made to serve the cause, I will suffer it.”

“We all make sacrifices, eh?” For a moment, Risinau wondered if his old friend might be mocking him a little, and was not at all pleased at the prospect. “Should I salute?”

“Never, my brother.” And he seized Sibalt’s hand, and shook it warmly, and clapped him on the arm besides. “In the world to come we shall all be equal!”

Though there would be different roles to play, of course. Tasks to suit the talents of each man. Only one with vision clear enough to see the stars could act as navigator, and plot the course they would all follow into the new future.

“I’m told two corpses washed up on the river bank.” Sibalt looked concerned. “Stained blue, they were. Drowned in the dye-works, most likely.” He dropped his voice. “Was that Judge’s doing?”

“I would not be at all surprised.”

“She’s got some bad folk following her, now. They’re calling ’emselves Burners.”

“I am aware.” Her violent excesses did not bother Risinau half so much as they once had. She was a vulgar lunatic, it needed hardly to be said, one step above a beast, in truth, but beasts have their uses.

“We should talk to the Weaver—”

“Believe me, brother, he understands better than anyone what must be done if we are to bring about our Great Change.” Except Risinau himself, of course, who could see the steps to freedom unfolding before him as though it was a thing already done. “People must have something to believe in.” And he touched a modest hand to his own chest. “But they must also have something to fear. Besides, I am sad to say the Weaver has left us. He will aid us from afar, where he can, but he has asked that from now on…” And Risinau gave a little laugh. As though it was nothing. As though it had not been his fondest wish for years. “I use the name.”

“You?”

“Who else?” He frowned at Sibalt. “Do I not inspire the people, with my speeches? Do our numbers not swell?”

“Aye, but—”

“Forget about Judge,” said Risinau, trying to contain his impatience. “Forget about Valbeck. I have a greater purpose in mind for you. The time has come to spread the message of the Breakers wider. To Keln. To Holsthorm. Even to Adua. That is where the people most need you, my friend.” He squeezed Sibalt’s shoulder. “Our movement’s strongest arm. Our most trusted pillar! You will do the good work within the shadow of our enemy’s fortress.”

Sibalt looked worried. “Adua? Isn’t that a risk—”

“We will not bring the Great Change without risks, my friend.” And he guided Sibalt towards the door. “I have been selfish. I have kept you here too long.” And he was getting too popular. That blunt good humour of his that had first drawn Risinau to him drew other people as well. Lately, Risinau had fancied the man was getting louder applause than he was at the meetings.

“Take Brother Moor and Sister Grise along. They both know the city. I have no doubt, with patience and care, you will bring other like-minded people into the fold…”

Somewhere in the Three Farms, Autumn 604

Sibalt sat, boots up on the table, reading his book. Or pretending to read it, anyway. Mostly he was peering over it, at Vick, standing by the window with her arms tight folded, frowning down into the street.

He couldn’t stop looking at her, for some reason. He’d seen her first in the back of a workers’ meeting, early summer, hot and smelly as a barn dance, but she’d ducked out before he could talk to her. Two weeks till he’d seen her again, and five till he’d found out her name. First bit of it, anyway. He still didn’t know the rest.

He couldn’t have said what it was about her. She was a hard case, that was sure, about as forthcoming as an oyster. Moor said she’d been with the rebels in Starikland. Cudber heard from someone she’d spent some time in the camps. Didn’t give much back. Unless you pushed her, he reckoned, then she’d give you more’n you bargained for. But he had this feeling there was something under there. Some oysters got a pearl in ’em, don’t they?

Her eyes flicked over to him and he glanced back to his book and almost certainly that instant too late. Wasn’t like she’d given him the slightest encouragement. Quite the reverse. But he just got this feeling, whenever their eyes met. This heat, made his mouth dry and his hands sweaty.

“Where is she?” she asked him.

“Grise?”

“No, the Queen o’ the Union. Yes, Grise.”

Sibalt puffed out his cheeks. “She’ll be along, don’t worry.”

“It’s when folk tell me not to worry that I really get to worrying.”

“Probably very sensible,” he murmured, trying out the hint of a grin. It only got Vick frowning harder. He wasn’t sure he’d seen her smile once. Made him want to see if he could coax one out. Made him yammer on, and crack bad jokes like some boy without a beard yet, and that just made her frown the harder.

She stepped away from the window, cross-shaped shadows of the glazing bars shifting across her face. “What’re you reading?” she asked, nodding at his book.

Sibalt wondered for a moment whether to lie. Wasn’t like this would make her take him more seriously. But he’d a sense she’d see straight through him. “It’s the life of Dab Sweet,” he turned it around to peer at the spine, “by…who’s this idiot? Marin Glanhorm.”

“What’s it about?”

“A famous scout. In the Far Country.” And he set the book down beside the candle, and flicked the pages till he came upon that picture he’d liked so much. “Big skies, and big grass, and… I don’t know. Living free, I guess.” Sounded more stupid than ever when he put it in words, but she wasn’t sneering.

She stepped up close to him to frown down at it, in fact. About as close as he’d ever got to her. About as close as he was ever likely to.

“You were in Starikland, weren’t you?” he asked. “That what it’s like out there?”

“I was in Starikland. Long way from the Far Country still.”

He looked at her beside him, the line of her jaw so fixed, and sharp, and strong, and perfect somehow, a little scar just beside it, and before he knew what he was doing he’d reached up and touched her there, just gently, just in the shadow under her ear, just with his fingertips.

Her face made this odd twitch, and her eyes flicked towards his. She swallowed. But she didn’t pull away. Or punch him in the balls, which was what he might’ve put his money on, if he’d had any.

“Best you don’t do that,” she said. But there was a kind of throaty softness to her voice he hadn’t heard before.

“Why?”

“We’ve got the cause to think on.”

“The cause won’t fail on account of a touch.”

“It might. Never turns out too well, for the men I put my hands on.”

“I’ll take the risk.”

She just kept frowning at him, not moving away, not moving towards.

He shrugged. “Can’t spend my whole life waiting for the Great Change, Vick. Might never come. Don’t we deserve…something…for ourselves, in the meantime?” He tried a hint of a smile. No more’n a twitch at the corner of his mouth, really, but she kept frowning, as hard as ever. He looked down. He took his hand away. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I won’t ask ag—”

And suddenly she’d taken his face with both hands, gripping it hard, twisting it up towards her, kissing him like the both of them had only a minute left to live. He thought he might’ve made a surprised little squeak, and she’d half climbed on top of him with one knee up on the chair and her groin pressing into his thigh and he had one hand in her hair and one arm around her back and could feel her ribs shifting under her shirt as she breathed.

They broke apart, staring at each other, gripping each other, breathing quick in each other’s faces, in the light of that one candle. Sibalt’s heart was thudding. First time he’d ever seen Vick look surprised. Like she couldn’t believe what she’d just done.

“Woah,” he whispered. So there was something under there, all right.

And at that very worst moment, the knob rattled round and the door shuddered open.

“Pamphlets,” grunted Grise, stomping in with a box in her arms, “fresh off the…” And she saw Sibalt staring over from his chair and Vick clambering off him just as fast as she could. “Press,” she finished, heavy brows drawing in hard.

“You took your time,” croaked Sibalt, trying to look like naught special had been happening and making quite the botch of it.

“Moor was late.” Grise dropped her box with a thud and propped her hands on her hips. “He’s downstairs with the rest of ’em.”

“I’ll help unload,” muttered Vick. Sibalt thought she might have had the hint of a blush on her sharp cheeks as she turned away. Made him like her more. A lot more. Grise, it seemed, felt otherwise, making a scowling obstacle of herself that Vick had to duck around, then kicking the door shut afterwards.

“Tell me you ain’t fucking her,” said Grise.

Was only then Sibalt realised he was staring after Vick like a love-lorn puppy. He frowned, and flipped that book shut. “I’m not.”

“But you’d like to be.”

“Finding folk guilty o’ what they’d like to be, now, are you? You should join the Inquisition, Grise, you’d make a fine Practical.”

“Just tell me you’ve told her naught about Valbeck. About the Weaver.”

“I’m the one brought you in, remember? No one gets told anything till they have to know it. Safest for everybody.”

“I don’t trust that bitch.”

Sibalt snorted. “You don’t trust anyone.”

“Not true. In fact I brought over someone you might like to meet. Won’t change the world wi’ just five of us, will we?”

“Six with Vick.”

Grise sucked sourly at her teeth. “Seven with this lad. Hey, Tallow! In you come.”

The Hill Street Foundry, Spring 605

“It’s ready,” said Vick. “Let’s go.”

Grise caught her arm in the darkness. “What about them?” And she jerked her head towards the two nightwatchmen minding the foundry’s gate.

“They’re paid.”

“You paid the fuckers?”

“It’s easier to shift a man with gold than steel, and it almost always ends up cheaper.” And Vick twisted free and strutted off across the street, collar up. Bloody hell, Grise hated that bitch, with her fancy name and her sob stories about the camps. Hated how she’d just waltzed in from nowhere and wrapped Sibalt around her finger and got everyone doing things her way.

She blew an angry breath into the drizzle, and on the other side of the street Grise heard the bar clatter and the hinges creak as the gates swung open.

Years, she’d been with the Breakers, and no one hardly ever asked her opinion.

“Let’s go!” called Vick, waving ’em on, and Moor gave the reins a flick and brought the wagon across the muddy street.

Grise walked alongside, frowning at the nightwatchmen, frowning at the darkened yard on the other side, frowning at the heaps of coal and stacks of wood, the towering wall of the foundry shed, light gleaming orange from beyond its windows. She didn’t like the looks of the place. Had a bad feeling in her gut and a sour taste in her mouth. She clenched her fists as Moor hauled on the brake and brought the wagon to a halt.

When she got scared, when she got doubts, she’d think o’ the guards at the mill where she used to work. The way they’d looked at her. That scorn. That contempt. She’d see their faces, and the anger would come up hot, and she’d remember something had to be done.

You want a Great Change, ain’t enough to sit there jawing about it.

“Working so far,” muttered Sibalt, and he gave Grise a clap on the shoulder as he jumped down from the back of the wagon. One of the lads, that’s all she was to him. All she’d ever be, now. Now that bitch Vick dan fucking Teufel had swanned in and stuck her gash in his face. She bared her teeth, snarling to herself as she started unlashing the tarp, ripping at the wet cords with her wet fingers.

Gears ground as Sibalt heaved the shed’s sliding door open, orange forgelight spilling from inside. Grise clambered onto the wagon’s back to drag away the tarp. “Time to strike a blow for the common man, eh?” she muttered at Tallow.

He stared down at her from the wagon’s seat with those big, sad eyes. “Aye, I guess, he said, watching Moor drag one of the barrels clear of the others.

“All right,” hissed Vick, “let’s get that first one—”

Grise gasped as light flared right in her eyes, daylight from nowhere, blinding her. “Hold!” bellowed a voice. “In the name of his Majesty!”

The wagon lurched forward, Grise stumbled, tangled with one of the tarp cords, made a despairing grab at the back of the seat then tumbled off the side, hit her head on a barrel rim on the way down then got a faceful of the wet cobbles.

She groaned, rolled, blood thudding in her skull. Could hear someone shouting. Slapping footfalls. She wobbled up to her knees, lights flickering, black figures against the bright. Something whipped past her and thudded into the side of the wagon. A flatbow bolt. More’n one.

“No,” she whispered. Moor was lying on his side by the wagon’s wheel, one bolt in his chest, one in his thigh, hatchet lying near his twitching fingers. “No!” Grise snatched it up and spun, crouching, baring her teeth. She could see the Practicals closing in. Black sticks, masked faces. Too many.

“Come on, you fuckers!” she screamed, standing over Moor’s corpse. “Come on!”

“Give it up,” said one, muffled through his mask. Sounded almost bored. Grise went at him, swinging, but he just took a watchful step back, and one of the others ducked in and cracked her across the back of the thigh with his stick while she was off-balance.

As she whipped towards him she was already falling to one knee. One of the others clubbed her on the shoulder, pain flashing up her neck. She lifted the hatchet but someone caught her arm, twisted it, a boot thudded into her side and drove her breath out in a wheeze. Tallow just watched the whole thing from the wagon’s seat, calm as anything.

“Run!” she groaned at him as they forced her down. “Run, you bastard!”

But he didn’t even try to run, let alone to fight. Just hopped down calmly from the wagon, and lowered himself calmly to his knees, and put his hands calmly behind his neck, just waiting to be shackled.

Grise screeched and kicked and spat and squirmed, managed to catch one Practical in the face with a boot but two of them had her, pinned her, and she was on her face on the cobbles with a knee in her back and the manacles scraping shut around her wrists. Another one stood over her, pulling out a canvas bag.

There was a chink of light across Tallow’s face, from one of the lanterns, and he didn’t look like he always did before. Those big, sad eyes had narrowed, hard, and there was this curl to his lip as he watched her struggle. Not pity and not fear. Scorn.

The way the guards at the mill used to look at her.

The House of Questions, Spring 605

Tallow had been wondering how to play it, when Vick came in. Just going over what he was supposed to know and what he wasn’t. Had to be on his toes all the time. Tip top form. Slip once and she’d more’n likely catch him out. She was sharp, he never doubted that for a minute. He’d learned a lot just from watching her, with the others. The way she hooked ’em, the way she reeled ’em in, never giving too much. He’d never have known she was a traitor. She’d have been the very last one he’d have picked. If Old Sticks hadn’t laid out the whole picture for him. She was sharp as all fuck. But he had one advantage, and it was a whopper.

She wanted to believe him.

So Tallow just made his eyes big. Poor me, poor me. Hunched his shoulders. So feeble, so scared. Little fucking sadsack. She wanted someone weak to protect. She wanted someone stupid to be clever for. So he made himself weak. He made himself stupid.

“Did you escape from them?” he whispered.

Vick gave a sad smile as she sat down opposite him, in the chair for the one who asks the questions. “No one escapes from them.”

“Then—”

“I am them.”

He looked at her for a long moment, wondering how to play it. Whether to scream insults at her. Whether to kick and scratch and play at going wild. But there was a chance she’d see through it. Better to keep it quiet, and let her fill in the blanks. So he just looked down at the stained table top and said, “Oh.”

“Do you know who I was just talking to, next door?” Tallow slowly shook his head, though he knew exactly who. “His Eminence the Arch Lector.”

He made his eyes even bigger, though his Eminence had been in his cell just before hers, giving him a few pointers on how to play this very interview. “Here?”

“In his crippled person. You’re a lucky boy. You’ve never seen him work. I have.” And she gave a long, soft whistle. “Old Sticks, well, he’ll be winning no footraces. But when it comes to making folk talk, believe me, there’s no one faster. My guess is your friend Grise will already be telling him everything she knows about everything.”

“She’s strong,” he said, though he’d naught but scorn for that dumb cow.

“No, she’s not. But it doesn’t matter. Once you’re stripped and alone and he starts cutting, there’s no strong that’s strong enough.”

Tallow could not have given less of a shit, but he’d been able to cry on cue for years, and he reckoned it a moment to let a tear or two run down his cheek. “But she’s—”

“Put her out of your mind. She’s already hanged. Moor’s dead, and Sibalt…” There was the slightest crack in Vick’s voice. Most wouldn’t have noticed, but Tallow did. He’d seen a few like her in the camps. Frozen hard on the outside, maybe, but still soft underneath.

“Sibalt?”

“He’s dead, too.”

“You say it like you’re proud.”

“I’m not. But I’m not ashamed, either. They made their choice, you heard me ask them. Just like I asked you.”

Tallow paused a moment, licking his lips. Had to play it careful, make sure she took the bait. “Grise is hanged, but…not me?”

“You catch on fast. For you there’s a door still open. For you…and your sister.” Tallow blinked at her. Old Sticks had known, like magic. Known just how it’d play out, almost word for word. Known she’d try and turn him, and just how she’d do it. He wondered how long Old Sticks had been planning this. How many moves ahead he was. All Tallow had to do was play along. Stupid little sadsack who’d do anything for his sister. Stupid little sadsack got himself in a pickle, and only Vick could help him out of it. “I told his Eminence maybe you could be saved,” she said. “Maybe you could be of service to the king.”

“What kind of service?” Though he knew, of course. He’d been doing it for months.

“Whatever kind I pick.”

He looked down at the table, thinking fast. What would the sadsack worry about? The good little soldier? Wouldn’t want to let the side down. He licked his lips. “Betraying my brothers,” he muttered, like each word hurt him.

“I expect so.”

“What choices do I have?”

“Just this one, and you’re damn lucky to be getting it.”

Now he looked up. Show her a trace of anger, trace of hurt, don’t let her have it all her own way. Make her work for it, like he’d seen her make Sibalt work. “Then why even ask?” he snapped.

“So you understand what you owe me.” Which was neat. Or would’ve been, if he’d been who she thought he was. She got up, slipping the key out, and unlocked his chains. Then she tossed him some clothes. “Get dressed. Then get some sleep. We’ll be leaving for Valbeck in the morning. Need to know where those dullards got three barrels of Gurkish Fire.”

Tallow left his wrists in the manacles. Reckoned he’d hook her guilt out, while he could. Her guilt was his grip on her. “Was any of it true?”

“Any of what?”

“What you told us?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “A good liar lies as little as possible.”

He’d have said the very same thing. “So…you really did grow up in the camps?”

“Twelve years. Girl and woman. My parents and my sisters died there.” She swallowed, and he could see it hurt her. “My brother, too.”

She couldn’t save her brother, so he’d give her a new one to save. “You’ve lost as much as anyone,” he said, looking like he didn’t get it, when the truth was he got it just as well as she did.

“More than most.”

“Then how can you—”

“Because if I learned one thing in the camps…” She leaned down over him, baring her teeth, and he cringed like he was terrified. “It’s that you stand with the winners.”

A good lesson. He’d learned it too. Vick strode to the door, and pulled it shut with a bang.

Tallow sat there for a moment longer. Then he allowed himself the tiniest little smile, and started getting dressed. He wondered what his sister would look like.

If he ever had to meet her.