The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness #2) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,118

into the future!”

Verunice applauded as eagerly as her corsetry allowed. One could see the future coming on the carriage ride out of Adua. The chimneys, the cranes, the endless building, endless creation, endless opportunity.

“There will be no going back!” shouted Curnsbick. “I promise you that!”

Verunice applauded again, painfully this time but she didn’t care. There would be no going back. Not to her smothering marriage or the suffocating house in the country or the stifling conversation at the village meetings. Her husband was dead and she had the money now and she’d buy herself a fucking life. She blushed, then realised she hadn’t said the word, only thought it, so where was the crime? It was a new world. She could think what she liked. Could she even say what she liked?

“Fuck,” she whispered, and felt herself blushing even more deeply. She wished she had brought her fan.

The young king smiled, so carefree, so debonair, such lovely glossy hair, his golden circlet glittering in the sun. The spirit of the age! “Carry us into the future, Master Curnsbick!”

Curnsbick chopped one broad hand down and Verunice closed her eyes, feeling the wind of freedom on her cheeks. Now she would be—

“We have made astonishing progress in a few brief years, my friends!” It was true the Union was much changed in the two decades since Muslan arrived but mostly, in his opinion, for the worse. He felt the stares when he walked the streets in his own neighbourhood. He felt the stares now. Less curiosity than there once had been, and more fear. More dislike. Insults were sometimes thrown. Objects, too, on occasion. A very pleasant young man of his acquaintance had been hit by a slate thrown from a roof and nearly killed. And he had been born in Adua! To Kadiri parents! When people are fixed on hatred they do not discriminate. But Muslan refused be cowed. He had not hidden from the priests. He would not hide from these damn fool pinks, either.

“With the right techniques and machinery,” Curnsbick blathered on, “one man can now do the work that once took ten! Took twenty!”

Muslan gave a curt nod at that. There was much to detest about the Union. They prated on freedom but the women who toiled in the fields and the kitchens, the men who toiled in the mills and the mines, were as trapped in their lives of drudgery as any slave. A man was at least free to think here, though. To have ideas. To change things.

In Ul-Suffayn the priests had declared him a heretic. His wife had begged him to stop, but to Muslan his work was a holy duty. Others saw their holy duties differently. His workshop had been burned by people he had once called friends and neighbours, the fires of belief in their eyes. They say belief is righteous, but to Muslan only doubt was divine. From doubt flows curiosity, and knowledge, and progress. From belief flows only ignorance and decay.

“I firmly believe that this, my latest invention…” And Curnsbick wafted a hand towards the engine in the manner of a carpet-seller hoping to palm off substandard wares. “Will carry all of us… into the future!”

We all are carried into the future, always. What greets us when we arrive, that is the pressing question. When the Prophet vanished, Muslan and those of his mind—the thinkers, philosophers, engineers—had hoped for a new age of reason. Instead had come an age of madness. The priests had said his work was against the laws of God. Ignorant cowards. Who made the minds of men, if not God? What was the desire to create, if not a humble imitation of His example? What was the grand idea, the great vision, the profound revelation, if not a glimpse of the divine?

“There are those at both ends of the social scale who would have us change direction!” Muslan had heard from those few friends in Ul-Saffayn who still dared write to him that the Eaters had come. They had taken his apprentices and his assistants and had burned his prototypes in the town square. He shuddered to think of it. The Eaters were belief distilled, belief without reason, mercy, compromise or regret. What could you call that, but evil?

“But there will be no going back!” roared Curnsbick. “I promise you that!”

“No going back,” whispered Muslan, in his own tongue. He closed his eyes, feeling tears prickling at the lids, and spoke the words to his wife, or