A Little Hatred (The Age of Madness #1) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,198

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.

‘Your triumph will take place in three days’ time. A parade of some four thousand soldiers, as well as foreign dignitaries and members of the Closed and Open Councils. It will begin at the palace, chart a course through the city around Arnault’s Wall, and return to the Square of Marshals. There His Majesty will give an address to the Union’s foremost citizens and present you with a commemorative sword.’

Leo couldn’t help smiling. ‘That all sounds … marvellous.’ The stuff of boyhood dreams, indeed.

‘Crown Prince Orso will ride alongside you,’ added Glokta.

‘Pardon me?’ asked Leo, smile quickly vanishing.

The Arch Lector’s eyelid flickered and a tear rolled down his cheek. He wiped it gently away with a fingertip. ‘His Highness won a famous victory of his own recently, putting down a rebellion in Valbeck—’

‘He hanged some peasants.’ Leo had been so pleased with himself all day that this sudden shock was doubly disappointing. ‘It’s hardly the same!’

‘True,’ said Glokta. ‘He is the heir to the throne, after all, and you the grandson of a traitor. Great generosity, on his part, to share the glory.’

Leo’s face tingled as if he’d been slapped. He bloody had been slapped, and in his pride, which was far more sensitive than his face. ‘I beat Stour Nightfall in a duel! I spared his life!’

‘In return for what?’

‘For his father and uncle quitting our land, keeping the Dogman’s Protectorate alive and safeguarding Angland!’

‘No further concessions?’ asked Glokta, his eyes glittering in their deep, bruised sockets. ‘No ongoing assurances?’

Leo blinked, wrong-footed. ‘Well … there’s a code of honour among Northmen.’

‘Even supposing there was, you aren’t one.’

‘Among warriors! Wherever they were born. And I was raised with Northmen!’ Leo curled his lip as he looked the cripple up and down. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘No? How do you think I got crippled? Codes of honour,