The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness #2) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,133

children? We’ve all got sad stories, arsehole!”

“Sacrifices have to be made! Would’ve been worth it, if His fucking Majesty didn’t have that Eater watching him.”

Vick frowned. She’d had a sense something had been cut from the reports. “Eater?”

“We had the knights beaten! Then that little nothing-looking bastard… he killed Turmer. Killed ’em all. Flung ’em about like they were straw.”

She remembered what Shenkt had done to those two Practicals, on the quay in Westport. Big men, tossed like dolls.

“But it don’t matter what devil deals you strike.” The prisoner nodded to himself, a strange little smile quivering on his lips. “Don’t matter how many Eaters you bring, or how many soldiers you hire, or how many folk have to die. There’s a Great Change coming.”

Vick gave a weary sigh. “Where’s Judge?”

“A Great Change.” His bloodshot eyes had drifted beyond her, gazing into the bright future, maybe. “And all the owners, and the bankers, and the kings, and the magi shall be swep” away!

She remembered what Vitari had told her, in that shack on the Westport waterfront. That the Union was Bayaz’s tool, the banks and the Inquisition his puppets, that she was already dancing to his tune. She didn’t like the thought that there might be some hidden world beneath this one. A world of Eaters, and magi, and secret powers. As if she swam out on a lake, seeing the ripples on the surface, never guessing there were hidden deeps below, ruled over by who knew what unknowable monsters. She shook the worry off. She had to stick to what could be touched, explained, offered up in evidence. “Where’s Risinau?” she growled.

“The House of the Maker will open!” he barked in a broken voice. “And those that were first will be last, and the last first!”

She thought about smashing her fist down on that mess of a hand while she screamed the questions in his face. But he had no answers. None that helped her, anyway. She got up and left him ranting, as mad as any of the cut-price prophets in Westport’s Temple Square.

“The gates shall be laid wide and Euz shall come again! And all shall be set right! You hear? A Great Change is—”

She pulled the door shut and clipped his voice back to a muffled burble. A Practical stood outside, arms folded.

“His Eminence wants you,” came hissing from his mask. “Right now.”

Vick strode past the eternally disapproving secretary, between the two towering Practicals and into the Arch Lector’s office, the door shutting behind her with a final-sounding click. Time for some answers, maybe. Or at least for some questions.

“Your Eminence, I have some questions about—” She stopped with Bayaz’s name on the tip of her tongue as Glokta’s guest turned in his chair, raising an urbane eyebrow.

“Inquisitor Teufel!” It was only the bloody king. “I never got the chance to thank you for your help in Valbeck. You made me look good, and that takes some damn doing. That note of yours saved my arse, not to mention several thousand others.” His smile faded somewhat. “Shame it couldn’t save everyone’s, really. And now I hear you pulled our feet out of the fire in Westport, too!”

Vick cleared her throat. “I am… delighted I could assist… Your Majesty.” She had slipped into the smooth, aristocratic, slightly constipated tone her mother might have used to greet the king. The full Victarine dan Teufel. Pathetic, really. The king’s so-called justice had sent her family to their deaths and her to rot in Angland, and here she was grovelling before the latest occupant of the throne. That was the Union for you: nobleman, peasant or convict, deference was baked in.

“I swear, you were the one person in Valbeck who kept their wits entirely about them.” The king wagged a finger at her as she sat beside him. “I thought then—next time I’m on a sinking ship, that’s the woman I want rowing the lifeboat.” And he reached out as if to clap her on the shoulder, must have sensed her deep discomfort, and ended up giving the back of her chair an awkward pat instead.

She had to admit she enjoyed the gratitude. It wasn’t something she tasted often and, like drink, if you only take it rarely a small measure can make you giddy. Any gratitude. Let alone a king’s. But as the silence stretched, she began to consider that bit about the lifeboat and cleared her throat again. “Is… the ship sinking, then?”

“There might be some bailing to