He hauled his aching legs through the archway and up the tunnel. The sun was barely above the horizon and the courtyard beyond was full of deep shadows. Squinting into the darkness he could see Varuz sat at the table, waiting for him. Damn it. He had hoped to be early for once. Did the old bastard sleep at all?
“Lord Marshal!” shouted Jezal, breaking into a half-hearted jog.
“No. Not today.” A shiver crept up Jezal’s neck. It was not the voice of his fencing master, but there was something unpleasantly familiar about it. “Marshal Varuz is busy with more important matters this morning.” Inquisitor Glokta was sitting in the shadows by the table and smiling up with his revolting gap-toothed grin. Jezal’s skin prickled with disgust. It was hardly what one needed first thing in the morning.
He slowed to a reluctant walk and stopped next to the table. “You will doubtless be pleased to learn that there will be no running, or swimming, or beam, or heavy bar today,” said the cripple. “You won’t even be needing those.” He waved his cane at Jezal’s fencing steels. “We will just be having a little chat. That is all.”
The idea of five punishing hours with Varuz seemed suddenly very appealing, but Jezal was not about to show his discomfort. He tossed his steels onto the table with a loud rattle and sat down carelessly in the other chair, Glokta regarding him from the shadows all the while. Jezal had it in mind to stare him into some kind of submission, but it proved a vain attempt. After a couple of seconds looking at that wasted face, that empty grin, those fever-bright sunken eyes, he began to find the table top most interesting.
“So tell me, Captain, why did you take up fencing?”
A game then. A private hand of cards with only two players. And everything that was said would get back to Varuz, that was sure. Jezal would have to play his hand carefully, keep his cards close and his wits about him. “For my own honour, for that of my family, for that of my King,” he said coldly. The cripple could try and find fault with that answer.
“Ah, so it’s for the benefit of your nation that you put yourself through this. What a fine citizen you must be. What selflessness. What an example to us all.” Glokta snorted. “Please! If you must lie, at least pick a lie that you yourself find convincing. That answer is an insult to us both.”
How dare this toothless has-been take that tone with him? Jezal’s legs gave a twitch: he was right on the point of getting up and walking away, Varuz and his hideous stooge be damned. But he caught the cripple’s eye as he put his hands on the arms of the chair to push himself up. Glokta was smiling at him, a mocking sort of smile. To leave would be to admit defeat somehow. Why did he take up fencing anyway? “My father wanted me to do it.”
“So, so. My heart brims with sympathy. The loyal son, bound by his strong sense of duty, is forced to fulfil his father’s ambitions. A familiar tale, like a comfortable old chair we all love to sit in. Tell ’em what they want to hear, eh? A better answer, but just as far from the truth.”
“Why don’t you tell me then?” snapped Jezal sulkily, “since you seem to know so much about it!”
“Alright, I will. Men don’t fence for their King, or for their families, or for the exercise either, before you try that one on me. They fence for the recognition, for the glory. They fence for their own advancement. They fence for themselves. I should know.”
“You should know?” Jezal snorted. “It hardly seems to have worked in your case.” He regretted it immediately. Damn his mouth, it got him in all kinds of trouble.
But Glokta only flashed his disgusting smile again. “It was working well enough, until I found my way into the Emperor’s prisons. What’s your excuse, liar?”
Jezal didn’t like the way this conversation was going. He was too used to easy victories at the card table, and poor players. His skills had dulled. Better to sit this one out until he got the measure of his new opponent. He clamped his jaw shut and said nothing.
“It takes hard work, of course, winning a Contest. You should have seen our mutual friend Collem West working. He sweated at it for months, running around while the rest of us laughed at him. A jumped-up, idiot commoner competing with his betters, that’s what we all thought. Blundering through his forms, stumbling about on the beam, being made a fool of, again and again, day after day. But look at him now.” Glokta tapped his cane with a finger. “And look at me. Seems he had the last laugh, eh, Captain? Just shows what you can achieve with a little hard work. You’ve twice the talent he had, and the right blood. You don’t have to work one tenth so hard, but you refuse to work at all.”
Jezal wasn’t about to let that one past. “Not work at all? Don’t I put myself through this torture every day—”
“Torture?” asked Glokta sharply.
Jezal realised too late his unfortunate choice of words. “Well,” he mumbled, “I meant.”
“I know more than a little about both fencing and torture. Believe me when I say,” and the Inquisitor’s grotesque grin grew wider still, “that they’re two quite different things.”
“Er…” said Jezal, still off balance.
“You have the ambitions, and the means to realise them. A little effort would do it. A few months’ hard work, then you would probably never need to try at anything again in your life, if that’s what you want. A few short months, and you’re set.” Glokta licked at his empty gums. “Barring accidents of course. It’s a great chance you’ve been offered. I’d take it; if I was you, but I don’t know. Maybe you’re a fool as well as a liar.”
“I’m no fool,” said Jezal coldly. It was the best he could do.
Glokta raised an eyebrow, then winced, leaning heavily on his cane as he slowly pushed himself to his feet. “Give it up if you like, by all means. Sit around for the rest of your days and drink and talk shit with the rest of the junior officers. There are a lot of people who’d be more than happy to live that life. A lot of people who haven’t had the chances you’ve had. Give it up. Lord Marshal Varuz will be disappointed, and Major West, and your father, and so on, but please believe me when I say,” and he leaned down, still smiling his horrible smile, “that I couldn’t care less. Good day, Captain Luthar.” And Glokta limped off toward the archway.
After that less than delightful interview, Jezal found himself with a few hours of unexpected free time on his hands—but he was scarcely in the frame of mind to enjoy it. He wandered the empty streets, squares and gardens of the Agriont, thinking grimly on what the cripple had said to him, cursing the name of Glokta, but unable to quite push the conversation from his mind. He turned it over and over, every phrase, constantly coming up with new things that he should have said. If only he had thought of them at the time.
“Ah, Captain Luthar!” Jezal started and looked up. A man he did not recognise was sitting on the dewy grass beneath a tree, smiling up at him, a half-eaten apple in his hand. “The early morning is the perfect time for a stroll, I find. Calm and grey and clean and empty. It’s nothing like the gaudy pinkness of evening time. All that clutter, all those people coming and going. How can one think in amongst all that nonsense? And now I see you are of the same mind. How delightful.” He took a big, crunching bite out of the apple.
“Do I know you?”
“Oh no, no,” said the stranger, getting to his feet and brushing some dirt from the seat of his trousers, “not yet. My name is Sulfur, Yoru Sulfur.”
“Really? And what brings you to the Agriont?”