“Don’t. Even. Bother.”
“I’m trying to be a better man, here, Dogman.”
“That so? I don’t see you trying that hard. Did you kill Tul?”
Logen’s eyes went narrow. “Dow been talking, has he?”
“Never mind who said what. Did you kill the Thunderhead or did you not? Ain’t a hard one to come at. It’s just a yes or a no.”
Logen made a kind of snort, like he was about to start laughing, or about to start crying, but didn’t do either one. “I don’t know what I did.”
“Don’t know? What use is don’t know? Is that what you’ll say after you’ve stabbed me through the back, while I’m trying to save your worthless life?”
Logen winced down at the wet grass. “Maybe it will be. I don’t know.” His eyes slid back up to the Dogman’s, and stuck there, hard. “But that’s the price, ain’t it? You know what I am. You could have picked a different man to follow.”
Dogman watched him go, not knowing what to say, not knowing what to think even. Just standing there, in the midst of the graves, getting wetter. He felt someone come up beside him. Red Hat, looking off into the rain, watching after Logen’s black shape growing fainter and fainter. He shook his head, mouth pursed up tight.
“I never believed the stories they told about him. About the Bloody-Nine. All bluster, I thought. But I believe ’em now. I heard he killed Crummock’s boy, in that fight in the mountains. Carved him careless as you’d crush a beetle, no reason. That’s a man there cares for nothing. No man worse, I reckon, ever, in all the North. Not even Bethod. That’s an evil bastard, if ever there was one.”
“That so?” Dogman found he was right up in Red Hat’s face, and shouting. “Well piss on you, arsehole! Who made you the fucking judge?”
“Just saying, is all.” Red Hat stared at him. “I mean… I thought we had the same thing in mind.”
“Well, we don’t! You need a mind bigger’n a pea to hold something in it and you’re lacking the equipment, idiot! You wouldn’t know a good man from an evil if he pissed on you!”
Red Hat blinked. “Right y’are. I see I got the wrong notion.” He backed off a stride, then walked away through the drizzle, shaking his head.
Dogman watched him go, teeth gritted, thinking how he wanted to hit someone, but not sure who. There was no one here but him, now, anyway. Him and the dead. But maybe that’s what happens once the fighting stops, to a man who knows nothing but fighting. He fights himself.
He took a long breath of the cold, wet air, and he frowned down at the earth over Grim’s grave. He wondered if he’d know a good man from an evil, any more. He wondered what the difference was.
Grey morning time, out in the cold, wet gardens, and the Dogman was just stood there, thinking about how things used to be better.
Not What You Wanted
Glokta woke to a shaft of soft sunlight spilling through the hangings and across his wrinkled bed-clothes, full of dancing dust-motes. He tried to turn over, winced at a click in his neck. Ah, the first spasm of the day. The second was not long coming. It flashed through his left hip as he wrestled his way onto his back and snatched his breath away. The pain crept down his spine, settled in his leg, and stayed there.
“Ah,” he grunted. He tried, ever so gently, to turn his ankle round, to work his knee. The pain instantly grew far worse. “Barnam!” He dragged the sheet to one side and the familiar stink of ordure rose up to his nostrils. Nothing like the stench of your own dung to usher in a productive morning.
“Ah! Barnam!” He whimpered, and slobbered, and clutched at his withered thigh, but nothing helped. The pain grew worse, and worse. The fibres started from his wasted flesh like metal cables, toeless foot flopping grotesquely on the end, entirely beyond his control.
“Barnam!” he screamed. “Barnam, you fucker! The door!” Spit dribbled from his toothless mouth, tears ran down his twitching face, his hands clawed, clutching up fistfuls of brown-stained sheet.
He heard hurried footsteps in the corridor, the lock scraping. “Locked you fool!” he squealed through his gums, thrashing with pain and anger. The knob turned and the door opened, much to his surprise. What the…
Ardee hurried over to the bed. “Get out!” he hissed, holding one arm pointlessly over his face, clutching at his bedclothes with the other. “Get out!”
“No.” She tore the sheet away and Glokta grimaced, waiting for her face to go pale, waiting for her to stagger back, one hand across her mouth, eyes wide with shock and disgust. I am married… to this shit-daubed monstrosity? She only frowned down, for a moment, then took hold of his ruined thigh and pressed her thumbs into it.
He gasped and flailed and tried to twist away but her grip was merciless, two points of agony stabbing right into the midst of his cramping sinews. “Ah! You fucking… you…” The wasted muscle went suddenly soft, and he went soft with it, dropping back against the mattress. And now being splattered with my own shit begins to seem just the slightest bit embarrassing.
He lay there for a moment, helpless. “I didn’t want you to see me… like this.”
“Too late. You married me, remember. We’re one body, now.”
“I think I got the better part of that deal.”
“I got my life, didn’t I?”
“Hardly the kind of life that most young women hanker for.” He watched her, the strip of sunlight wandering back and forth across her darkened face as she moved. “I know that I’m not what you wanted… in a husband.”
“I always dreamed of a man I could dance with.” She looked up and held his eye. “But I think, perhaps, that you suit me better. Dreams are for children. We both are grownups.”
“Still. You see now that not dancing is the least of it. You should not have to do… this.”
“I want to do it.” She took a firm grip on his face and twisted it, somewhat painfully, so he was looking straight into hers. “I want to do something. I want to be useful. I want someone to need me. Can you understand that?”
Glokta swallowed. “Yes.” Few better. “Where’s Barnam?”
“I told him he could have the mornings off. I told him I’d be doing this from now on. I’ve told him to move my bed in here, as well.”
“But—”
“Are you telling me I can’t sleep in the same room as my husband?” Her hands slid slowly over his withered flesh, gentle, but firm, rubbing at the scarred skin, pressing at the ruined muscles. How long ago? Since a woman looked at me with anything but horror? Since a woman touched me with anything but violence? He lay back, his eyes closed and his mouth open, tears running from his eye and trickling down the sides of his head into the pillow. Almost comfortable. Almost…
“I don’t deserve this,” he breathed.
“No one gets what they deserve.”
Queen Terez looked down her nose at Glokta as he lurched into her sunny salon, without the slightest attempt to hide her utter disgust and contempt. As though she saw a cockroach crawling into her regal presence. But we will see. We know well the path, after all. We have followed it ourselves, and we have dragged so many others after. Pride comes first. Then pain. Humility follows hard upon it. Obedience lies just beyond.
“My name is Glokta. I am the new Arch Lector of his Majesty’s Inquisition.”
“Ah, the cripple,” she sneered. With refreshing directness. And why do you disrupt my afternoon? You will find no criminals here.” Only Styrian witches.
Glokta’s eyes flickered to the other woman, standing bolt upright near one of the windows. “It is a matter we had better discuss alone.”
“The Countess Shalere has been my friend since birth. There is nothing you can say to me that she cannot hear.” The Countess glared at Glokta with a disdain little less piercing than the queen’s.