A Little Hatred (The Age of Madness #1) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,199

I fear, aren’t worth the paper they’re not written on. You could have taken Stour hostage. Could have delivered him to the king to ensure Scale Ironhand’s future good behaviour. Instead, you secured nothing but his word.’

Leo wasn’t sure whether he was more furious because Glokta was obviously wrong or because he wondered whether he might have a point. Perhaps there was more to this bureaucracy business than he’d thought. ‘I won.’ His voice had a hint of that whine it had when he complained to his mother. ‘I beat the whole bloody North! And without one soldier from Adua. I risked my life—’

‘You risked not only your life, which is yours to lose, but Union interests, too, which most definitely are not. I am prone to be more generous, but some might call that reckless.’

‘I …’ Leo could hardly believe it. ‘I made a friend of the next King of the Northmen! I’m a soldier, not a bloody diplomat!’

‘You must be both.’ Glokta was implacable. ‘You are a lord governor now. One of the greatest men in the Union. One of His August Majesty’s most important servants. You cannot simply think with your sword any more. Do you understand, Your Grace?’

Leo sat and stared, stunned by the disrespect, the injustice, the rank ingratitude. He’d been far from keen on the Closed Council when he arrived in Adua. One interview with this crooked desk-worm and he was utterly disgusted by them.

‘By all the fucking dead,’ he whispered, in Northern.

The Arch Lector either took that for agreement or simply acted as if he did. ‘I believe the lord chancellor wished to talk to you next. Some concerns over the latest tax receipts from Angland. It wouldn’t do to keep him waiting.’ He nodded towards the scroll, which Leo only at that moment realised was still in his clenched fist. ‘Perhaps you should present your war debts to him.’ Glokta plucked up his pen and slid down the next document in a heap. ‘It seems a lord governor must be warrior, diplomat and accountant.’

A Natural

Broad turned the handle, swung the carriage door open and respectfully stood out of the way.

Savine raised a brow at him. ‘And?’

‘Oh.’ He offered her his hand. ‘Er … my lady.’ He helped her down while Rabik grinned from the driver’s seat, thoroughly tickled to see the business handled so badly.

So Broad reckoned he was a coachman now. He had the livery, anyway. Bright green jacket with brass buttons, better than most officers had got in Styria. Shiny new boots, too, though they were prone to pinch. He might’ve felt quite the fool in all the finery, if it hadn’t been so clear that anyone within a hundred paces would be staring at Savine instead, and that included him.

He could still hardly believe this beautiful, masterful woman was the same ragged, helpless girl who’d hidden in his daughter’s room. She seemed to come from a different species than the sorry rest of humanity now. Her clothes were a masterpiece of engineering as much as tailoring, twisting her into a shape no person ever was. She was graceful as a tightrope-walker, unstoppable as a warship’s figurehead. Folk stood gaping at her, like one of the Fates had dropped from the sky and was taking a stroll through their building site.

‘Should I stay here?’ muttered Broad as he helped Zuri down, not that she needed it, she was deft as a dancer. Probably she should’ve been helping him.

‘No, no.’ She had a smile that was hard to pin down. ‘It would be lovely if you came along.’

They’d made a huge breach in the old city walls, rubble showing through a teetering mass of scaffolding and two cranes towering overhead. They’d knocked down a few rows of houses, too, and were digging a mighty trench through the midst of it all. Parties of men, some of them bare-chested even in the cold, thumped away with picks and shovels in time to a work song growled between gritted teeth. Women in filthy dresses, wet hair plastered to their faces, slipped and slid up the bank with yokes across their shoulders holding buckets full of mud. Further back, children swarmed in the bottom of the great diggings, smeared grey from head to toe, stamping clay down around the sides of the trench with their bare feet.

‘What is this?’ muttered Broad.

‘It will be a canal,’ said Zuri, ‘floating cargo into the heart of the city. And out again, of course.’

‘What’s Lady Savine’s interest?’

‘One-fifth