The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness #2) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,152

when you do.”

Orso sucked at the pipe one more time and let the smoke float from his pursed lips. “How thoroughly Styrian of you.”

“Jurand?” called Leo as he pushed open the doors.

But the room was empty. Sounds of the city outside. Music and laughter. Gilt mouldings gleamed in the darkness, drapes stirred about the open window. That made him frown. Surely they’d shut it? Could someone have broken in? Be waiting for them? It only came to him then how dangerous this business might be. How many enemies he’d made. They should never have split up! He put a hand on the hilt of his sword.

“Glaward!” he hissed, wincing as he stepped into the room. After the walk back, his leg was burning all the way from his foot to his hip, he could hardly bend the knee.

Antaup started giggling, which didn’t help. He’d been giggling all the way from bloody Cardotti’s. “Pour me a drink, eh—”

“Shush!” Leo caught him by the elbow and half-steered, half-threw him into a chair.

He sat there, shaking with suppressed laughter which, within a few breaths, turned to gentle snoring.

“By the dead,” muttered Leo. Then he saw a chink of light at the keyhole of one of the connecting doors. Jurand’s and Glaward’s masks dangled on the knob beside it. Whale and bird. A flood of relief. He let go of his sword, went to the door and shoved it wide. “There you are—”

He thought at first that they were wrestling, and nearly laughed at the mismatch.

They were kneeling on the Gurkish carpet, Glaward gripping two fistfuls of the covers which he’d half-dragged from the bed, eyes squeezed shut and his mouth open. Jurand was pressed against his back with his teeth bared, one hand down between Glaward’s legs, the other tangled in his hair and twisting his head around so he could bite at his ear.

Then Leo realised Jurand had his trousers down around his ankles and Glaward had his off completely, flung rumpled into a corner, their hairy thighs pressed together, and suddenly it was entirely clear what they were doing, and it wasn’t wrestling.

“But…” he breathed, clapping a hand over his face, but somehow still looking through the gap between his fingers. “Fuck!”

He reeled away, nearly tripped over Antaup’s outstretched boot and stumbled from the room, out into the corridor, leg burning, face burning. He was sickened, shamed, disgusted. Wasn’t he?

“Leo!” Jurand’s voice echoed at him from behind and Leo flinched, kept lurching on, didn’t look back.

By the dead, he wished he’d never come to Styria.

No Philosopher

They pulled the hood off and Broad was left squinting through one eye, trying and failing to bring the lamplit blurs around him into focus.

“Well, well, well. Gunnar Broad, in my back parlour.”

He knew that voice right off, and what he thought was, Fuck. What he said was, “Hello, Judge.”

“Told you he’d be back, eh, Sarlby?” One of those blurs drifted towards him. “Some men just can’t help ’emselves.” Someone perched his lenses on his nose, nudged them into that familiar groove and, like magic, everything became clear. Might’ve been better if it hadn’t.

Judge grinned down at him, Sarlby and a few others of his ilk standing around the stained walls of a cellar with not a friendly eye among ’em. Time hadn’t improved her. She still wore that rusted breastplate over a ragged ballgown looked like it belonged to a baroness chased through a briar patch. Her red hair was an even madder tangle, gathered up like some parrot’s crest on top and clipped to patchy stubble at the sides. She still was decked with jewels, chains of office and strings of pearls ripped from the rich of Valbeck in the uprising. But, as if she needed to look more like bloodshed personified, she’d strapped herself up with belts and bandoliers, too, knives dangling from them, hatchets tucked into them, blades enough to run a chain of butchers.

She’d made him nervous the first time he laid eyes on her, and being chained to a chair in her presence helped not one bit. Made him think of all the dead folk she’d left hanged in the yard behind the ruined courthouse. He could still hear the sound of it, like a ship’s rigging, creaking with the breeze.

He’d been hoping for Risinau. That would’ve been worrying enough. Judge was ten times worse. Worse ’cause she was far more clever and far more dangerous. Worse ’cause if she was in charge, reason was out the window and running