The lord chamberlain delicately cleared his throat. ‘Your Grace will discover there is little that happens in Adua without Arch Lector Glokta’s approval.’
One of the banners at the front of the Young Lion’s grand column had got tangled with a washing line, so they all had to sit in their splendid saddles waiting for it to get untangled. Leo himself could hardly be seen for the fawning gaggle of overpriced arse-lickers. Even Jurand and Glaward had been demoted to trailing after, eased further back with every turn. Seemed the fake adoration of strangers mattered more to Leo than his friends, or his family, or his lover. If that’s what she still was to him. If that’s what she’d ever been.
Rikke raised her brows as a whole column of dark-skinned soldiers tramped out of a side street, gilded standards flashing and spears lowered. Wasn’t until a wagon rattled right through ’em she realised they weren’t there.
‘By the dead.’ She held a hand over her left eye, hot and itching and aching right into her teeth.
‘Still seeing things?’ murmured Isern, jaw chomp-chomping happily on chagga. ‘Take it as proof the moon has marked you special, and rejoice.’
It all made Rikke more than a bit nostalgic for a time when folk just thought she was mad. ‘If this is special, I reckon I’d rather be ordinary.’
‘Aye, well, we all want the things we haven’t got.’
‘That’s it? Thought you were here to help me with the Long Eye?’
‘I said I’d work out if you had it, then help you ease it open. Plain to everyone at that battle or that duel you’ve got it and it’s wide open.’ Isern grinned over. ‘Closing the bastard was never numbered among my promises.’
‘Fucking marvellous,’ muttered Rikke, nudging her horse on so she could find some space to get a breath. Wasn’t easy in this damn place, though.
By the dead, the air. Close and sticky and full of odd smells. There was a catch and a scratch in her throat, a sting at her eyes, like far-off burning. And the noise. The babbling in a dozen languages she didn’t know, pleading, shouting, fighting, everyone shoving on to nowhere as if they were all endlessly late for everything. Hammers clanging, wheels turning and fires burning, so many it became a low rumble that made the ground buzz. As though the city itself were alive, and tortured, and angry, and desperate to wriggle free of its infestation of human lice.
‘All this progress.’ Bayaz again, glancing approvingly at vast building sites to either side, with their towering cranes and their cobwebs of rope and scaffold and their swarms of bellowing workmen. ‘You would not believe how much it has changed in so short a time. This district, the Three Farms? I remember when it was three farms, and far outside the city walls! The city burst those walls and they threw up another set and it burst those, too, and the Three Farms is so built over with manufactories, there’s barely a stride of grass left in the borough. All iron and stone, now.’
Rikke watched one of the horses in front lift its tail and drop a few turds. There was still plenty of that in the streets. ‘All iron and stone? That a good thing?’
Bayaz snorted as if the whole idea of good was a waste of his valuable time. ‘It is a thing as irresistible as the tide. A golden tide of industry and commerce. There is no limit on what can be bought and sold. Why, I saw a shop not far behind that was selling nothing but soap. A whole shop. For soap! When you reach my age, you learn to swim with the current.’
‘Huh. Would’ve thought famous wizards would ride up front with the big folk, rather than getting stuck at the back with the dross.’
Bayaz smiled. He was a hard bastard to rattle, the First of the Magi. ‘The figurehead goes at the front of the ship. Braves the terror of wind and waves, takes the risks and reaps the glory. But it’s an unnoticed fellow hidden away near the back who does the steering.’ He smiled up towards the head of the column. ‘No leader worth a damn ever led from the front.’
‘Words to live by, I reckon,’ murmured Rikke.
‘The last wisdom I can offer you for the moment, I fear.’ And Bayaz pulled his horse up at the grand front steps of a building. Vast, it was, somewhere between fortress and temple with huge pillars at the front and carved masonry all over but precious little in the way o’ windows.
‘What’s this place?’ She didn’t much like its looks. Lots of serious people going in and out, stepping around some well-dressed fellow with papers dangling from one limp hand, the strangest horrified look on his face. ‘A school for wizards?’
‘Not quite,’ said the First of the Magi. ‘It is a bank.’
‘Master Bayaz?’ An ordinary-looking man had come up to hold the wizard’s bridle.
‘Ah! This is Yoru Sulfur, a member of the Order of Magi.’
‘I’m Rikke,’ said Rikke, ‘rhymes with—’
‘Yes,’ said Sulfur, smiling up. ‘The Dogman’s daughter. The one blessed with the Long Eye.’
Rikke was caught between suspicion and satisfaction that her legend had come ahead of her. ‘Or cursed with it, I guess.’
‘I hope we might speak more later,’ said Bayaz. ‘Young women born with the Long Eye are rare indeed in these latter days.’
‘Almost as rare as Magi,’ she grunted.
Sulfur smiled wider, his eyes never leaving her face, and she realised they were different colours, one blue, one green. ‘We relics of the Age of Magic really should stick together.’
‘Can’t see why not. I’m hardly besieged by admirers.’
‘Not yet, perhaps.’ Bayaz gave her one last thoughtful glance. Like a butcher assessing a shepherd’s flock and judging what to offer. ‘But who can say what the future holds?’
‘Aye,’ murmured Rikke as she watched him climb the steps with his curly haired sidekick, ‘that’d be a fine bloody trick.’
Shivers was sitting in his saddle, turning that ring he wore on his little finger around and around, glaring up at the bank with a frown hard even for him.
‘What’s your problem?’ asked Rikke.
He turned his head and spat. ‘Never trusted banks.’
The man they called Old Sticks, the king’s chief torturer, Arch Lector Glokta, hunched behind a giant desk loaded with papers, frowning as he signed one after another. Death sentences, Leo imagined, bloodlessly executed with a flick of the pen.
His Eminence made Leo wait an insultingly long time before he finally looked up, winced as he leaned to drop his pen into its bottle of ink, and smiled. On that gaunt, waxy, wasted face, etched by deep grimace-lines, a yawning gap where the four front teeth should’ve been, it was an expression as painfully unsettling as a leg bent the wrong way at the knee. If inward corruption expressed itself as outward ugliness – and Leo had always been sure it did – the Arch Lector was even more vile than the vilest things they said about him. And that was saying something. He held out his hand.
‘Forgive me, Your Grace, I cannot easily rise.’
‘Of course.’ Leo limped forward, leaning heavily on his cane. ‘Not too sprightly myself right now.’
‘You, I trust, will heal.’ Glokta’s revolting grin grew wider. ‘I fear that ship has sailed for me.’
He looked as if a stiff breeze would shred him, but his bony hand, its liver-spotted skin almost transparent, gripped far harder than Bremer dan Gorst’s great paw. You can tell a lot about a man from his handshake, his father had always said, and this old cripple’s was like a smith’s pincers.
‘I must congratulate you on your victory,’ said Glokta, after studying Leo a moment longer. ‘You have done the Crown a great service.’
‘Thank you, Your Eminence.’ Though who could’ve denied it? ‘But I didn’t do it alone. Lot of good men dead. Good friends … dead. And the cost to Angland’s coffers was huge.’ Leo pulled out the weighty scroll his mother had given him. ‘The ruling council of the province asked me to present His Majesty’s advisors with this accounting for the campaign. In the absence of any help from the Crown during the war, they expect – they demand – financial support in the aftermath.’ Leo had practised that speech on the trip and was rather pleased with how it came out. He could manage this bureaucracy business as well as anyone. But Glokta looked at the scroll as if he was being presented with a turd. His eyes moved up to Leo’s.