A Little Hatred (The Age of Madness #1) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,65

twitched and Orso inwardly cursed. These flourishes of cleverness never did him the slightest good. He would get further with powerful men if they thought they were indulging an idiot. They probably were, after all.

‘My father has given me leave to go,’ he went on. ‘Lord Marshal Brint can supply the officers. What I am lacking are the men. Or, more precisely, the money to pay and outfit them. Five thousand of the blighters, to be precise.’

His Eminence sat back and regarded Orso with those sunken, feverishly bright eyes. Not a pleasant gaze to endure, by any means. Orso was glad he had only to endure it here, on the ground floor of the House of Questions, and not below.

‘Do you know my daughter, Your Highness?’

A chilly breeze drifted through the Arch Lector’s stark, hard office then, making the great heaps of papers on the tables shift and crackle like restless spirits. For a moment, Orso found himself wondering how many of them were the confessions of guilty traitors. Or innocent ones. But he was decidedly pleased with the way he kept his face blank, despite the sudden surge of guilty horror, not to mention healthy fear, produced by the question. Orso might not have excelled in all the areas his mother would have liked, but at feigning ignorance he was a master. Perhaps because he had so much real ignorance to draw on.

‘Your daughter … Sarene, is it?’

‘Savine.’

‘Savine, of course. I believe we’ve met … somewhere.’ Indeed, his tongue had met her quim and her mouth his cock not long ago and they had all got on bloody famously. He cleared his throat, aware of a swelling in his trousers by no means appropriate during a meeting with the most feared man in the Union. ‘Charming girl … as I recall.’

‘Do you know what she does?’

‘Does?’ Orso was starting to wonder if His Eminence had found out all about their little arrangement, in spite of the exhaustive precautions Savine insisted on. He was a man whose job it was to find things out, after all, and he was very, very good at his job. And that was not the sum of his job. Orso was confident the heir to the throne would not be bobbing to the surface of a canal any time soon, bloated by seawater and horribly mutilated, but … the Arch Lector would be a bad man to upset. The worst. ‘Young ladies do a lot of sewing, I understand?’

‘She is an investor,’ said Glokta.

Orso played the dunce, waving one hand so his lace cuff flapped about the fingers. ‘A kind of … merchant?’

‘A merchant in inventions. Machines. Manufactories. Better ways of doing things. She buys ideas and makes them real.’

Orso could not, in fact, have been more awed and mystified by what Savine did if she had been a magus practising High Art, but he thought it might suit the role better if he barked out a mildly contemptuous laugh. ‘How thoroughly … modern.’

‘Thoroughly modern. In my youth, for someone to make a considerable fortune in that way, let alone a woman, would have been unthinkable. Savine may be a pioneer, but there are others following. We are entering a new age, Your Highness.’

‘We are?’

‘My daughter recently helped finance the building of a large mill near Keln.’ And His Eminence pointed with one pale, knobbly finger across the map of the Union carved into the tabletop between them, towards what looked like nothing so much as an old, stained nail mark. ‘In that mill is a machine, operated by one man and powered by a waterwheel, that can card as much wool in a day as nine men could the old way.’

‘I suppose that’s a fine thing for the wool trade?’ offered Orso, baffled.

‘It is. A fine thing for my daughter and her partners, too. But it is not so fine a thing for those other eight men, who used to card wool and are now looking for a new way to feed their families.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘And the very clever man who came up with that machine – a Gurkish refugee by the name of Masrud – has just come up with another that spins the carded wool into thread. Each one of those puts six women out of work. And they’re not happy about it.’

‘Arch Lector, fascinated though I am by your daughter’s exploits,’ and he bloody was, he was having to cross his legs at the thought of her to prevent embarrassment, ‘I’m