turned from new paving, to old cobbles, to straw-scattered dirt, to rutted mud. Narrower streets, further from the river, away from the manufactories. The buildings closed in until she crept down stinking man-made gullies paved only with the slops from the cellars, mean windows down by her boots, wretched garments flapping overhead like bunches of mad flags, little patches of the street made into pens where pigs honked and squealed and burrowed in the rubbish.
A murk even more hellish than usual had descended on the city as the sun sank and smoke from burning buildings billowed into the streets. Shapes loomed and vanished, phantoms in the soupy gloom. Savine was utterly lost. Valbeck was become a maze of horrors from which there was no escape. Could this be the same world as the one in which she presided over meetings of the Solar Society, changing lives with a flick of her fan?
Suddenly people were scattering like a shoal of fish, squealing in terror. She had no idea what they were running from but the panic was more contagious than the plague and she fled, fled mindlessly to nowhere, snatched breath sharp in her raw throat, rotten coat flapping at her skinned knees. She saw a man duck into an alleyway and followed, nearly ran straight into him as he spun about, a broken-off chair leg in his hand.
‘Get back!’ His face was so deranged, he hardly looked human. He shoved her and she fell, biting her tongue, sprawling in the street, nearly cutting herself on her sword as she rolled in the gutter. Someone kicked her in the side as they ran past, tumbled over her. She scrambled up, limping on, wincing at new bruises.
Could it have been only that morning she swapped small talk at Mistress Vallimir’s overdecorated breakfast table? Such a fragrant tea, who is the importer? Could it have been only an hour ago she had mused on the price of children with the colonel? Her lovely new sword-belt, such craftsmanship! Now the colonel and his wife were more than likely murdered and Savine dan Glokta was a memory. An unlikely story she once heard.
If fate let her live through this nightmare, she would be better. She would be the good person she had always pretended to be. No longer a gambler. No longer an ambitious snake. If fate would only let her live. Soon enough, she realised she was muttering it to herself with every whimpering breath.
‘Let me live … let me live … let me live …’
Like a poem. Like a prayer. She used to laugh when Zuri spoke of God. How could someone so clever believe something so silly? Now she tried to believe herself. Wished she could believe.
‘Let me live …’
She limped into a square of buckled cobbles, a grand building burning at one end. Fire spouted behind black columns, ash fluttering down against the bloody sunset. An old statue of Harod the Great stood in the centre. Figures were gathered around the pedestal, beating at the legs with hammers. Others had tied ropes about its shoulders, straining to drag it down. A gleeful crowd watched, torches in their hands, screeching with joy and fury, swearing in rough voices. Music was playing, a pipe and a fiddle tooting and sawing, a woman crazily dancing, ragged skirts and ragged hair whirling. And a man. A naked, fat man lumbering about. An air of mad carnival.
Savine stood staring, beyond desperate, beyond exhausted. She was filthy as a pig. She was thirsty as a dog. She almost wanted to laugh. She almost wanted to cry. She almost wanted to join the dancers, and give up. She sagged against a wall, trying to breathe. Trying to think. But that mad music left no room for it.
Figures, black against the fires, shimmering with their heat. A tall man in a tall hat, pointing, screaming.
‘Rip it down!’ bellowed Sparks.
He was a fucking king, and this square was his kingdom, and he’d suffer no other king within its borders. ‘Rip it down!’
Might be he’d get a new statue up there in due course. A statue of him, wearing the tall hat he’d just stolen that made him look quite the fine article.
Sparks was scared of nothing. The more he said it, to everyone else and to himself, the more true it became. Acres had been scared of everything. Had hidden crying in the cupboard when men came to visit his mother. Sparks hated that weak little cringing bastard, scared of