The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness #2) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,153

for the hills. Worse ’cause the moment he saw her, he felt that guilty tickle, deep inside. The same one he got when he felt violence coming.

She leaned down over him, reached out and smoothed his hair with one ring-encrusted hand like a mother might smooth a wayward son’s. It was the best he could do not to twist away. Twist away, or maybe twist closer.

“You know how sometimes…” she purred, “you see an old lover you haven’t seen in years… and you get that tingle in the crotch.” He knew what a tingle in the crotch felt like, all right, he had one now. “And you think to yourself… why aren’t we still together? How could something so sweet have turned so sour?”

“Might be all the hangin’s,” tossed out Sarlby from the corner of the room.

Judge pushed her lips into a pout. “Folk just don’t understand me. That’s my tragedy.” She snapped her fingers and one of the men slapped a bottle of spirits into her hand. “But you do, don’t you, Bull Broad? I knew it when you flung that man o’ mine across my courtroom and smashed his head through a witness box. You see what needs to be done.”

And she curled her tongue around the neck of the bottle and drank, blotchy throat shifting with each hard swallow. She caught Broad watching and grinned as she smacked her lips. Gave the bottle a shake, that lovely tinkle of spirits sloshing inside.

“Want a drink?”

“No,” he said, wanting one worse than just about anything and not hiding it well.

“You sure? ’Cause I’m getting the feeling there’s something over here you like the look of.”

Broad watched, caught somewhere between terrified and fascinated as she reached down, took the hem of her tattered skirts and pulled it up, up to show the writing tattooed around and around her thigh, long-winded quotes from some political treatise or other, and she slipped that leg over his and straddled him, knives and chains scraping against her breastplate as she perched herself on his lap.

“Sarlby tells me you want to talk to the Breakers,” she said.

Broad tried to tell himself Judge on top of him was the last thing in the world he’d want. That he was in more danger here than he’d been climbing a ladder onto the walls of Musselia, crowded with enemies. That she disgusted him.

He wasn’t sure who he was fooling.

“Shame is, the Breakers melted away like snow in spring,” said Judge. “Those they didn’t hang, like your friend Sarlby here…” and she tossed him the bottle, “have seen the light of the fire. Seen the folly of half-measures. Risinau’s off down in Keln or some such fancy place, preaching his blather to the wide-eyed and wishful. But those of us still in Valbeck.” She leaned close, breath hot on his face. “We’re all Burners now.”

Broad tried to keep Liddy and May in his mind. It was them he was doing this for. Had to keep a grip on himself. But it wasn’t easy with Judge’s crotch pressing up against his half-hard prick and the reek of spirits so strong on her breath it was making his head spin.

“Breakers or Burners,” croaked Broad, “makes no difference.”

“Suppose it wouldn’t to you.” She gave a long sniff. “I hear you’ve crossed the lines.”

“Gone to serve the owners,” grunted Sarlby.

“And not just any owner, but the queen bee herself! The fruit of Old Sticks’ own withered loins, Savine dan fucking Glokta!”

“Dan Brock,” muttered Broad.

Judge smiled. Or at any rate showed her teeth. “Don’t try and trick a trickster. Or at least try a bit harder. The owners chisel our pay every unjust way they can and call it an honest wage. The Closed Council drafts a set of rules that make the rich richer and drive the poor to starve and call it an equality law. You know what they named the most low-lying, smog-choking, shit-stinking alley of rotten cellars in all of Valbeck?” She leaned a little closer to whisper it. “Primrose Heights. Calling a thing a different thing don’t make it a different thing, now does it?”

“Wouldn’t know,” croaked Broad, who beat men for a living and called it labour relations, “I’m no philosopher.”

“Just a traitor.” She barked the word, and suddenly she was standing over him with her black eyes blazing, a handful of his shirt clutched in one trembling fist and a cleaver drawn in the other. She pressed that cold metal into his neck, twisting him back in