The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness #2) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,33

Wetterlant well, and this bluster is merely the tigress’s desperate defence of her cub. She is fierce, but no fool. I believe when she realises the alternative… she will help me secure an admission of guilt.”

“A confession?”

“A full and contrite confession with no need for the Arch Lector’s… intervention. The trial could be a formality. A demonstration of your justice done, firmly but fairly. Of your power exercised, without delay or dispute. Of a new spirit of cooperation between the Open Council and the Closed.”

“Well, that would be a fine thing.” It might have been the first time Orso had enjoyed discussing official business. “It’s supposed to be a damn Union, isn’t it? We should strive to find our way to common ground. Perhaps some good can come of this after all.” Orso sat back, grinning up at the gilded birds as he considered it. “I certainly do hate hangings.”

Isher smiled. “What kind of monster enjoys them, Your Majesty?”

An Ambush

Squeak, squeak, squeak, went the wheel of her father’s chair. Savine narrowed her eyes at it. Gritted her teeth at it. Struggled with every turn of that wheel not to scream.

She had been walking her father to work, then wheeling him to work, once a month since she was a girl. The same route down the Kingsway, between the statues of Harod and Bayaz that began the frowning parade of the Union’s heroes. The same conversation, like a fencing match in which you were never sure whether the steels were blunted. The same laughing at the misfortunes of others. She saw no reason to change her habits simply because her life was falling apart around her, so she mimed the old routines. Still walking, like a ghost through the ruins of the house she died in. Still wriggling, like a snake with its head cut off. Not laughing at misfortunes so much, mind you. One’s own bad luck is so much less amusing than other people’s.

“Something on your mind?” asked her father. Though he wasn’t really her father, of course.

“Nothing much,” she lied. Just a string of failing investments, a network of souring acquaintances, a calamitous love affair with her own brother, the ruin of all her dearest ambitions, a constant feeling of nagging horror, an aching chest, occasional waves of weariness, a near-constant need to spew, and the minor detail that she was a bastard carrying a bastard who had become a terrified impostor in her own life. Other than that, all good.

Squeak, squeak, fucking squeak. Why the hell had she ever asked Curnsbick to build this shrieking contraption?

“How’s business?”

Ever more disastrous. “Good,” she lied as she pushed the chair through the giant shadow of Arnault the Just. “If they keep digging at this rate, the canal will be completed within the month.”

“You let Kort off with a warning? I thought you might have had him skinned as an example to your other partners.”

“Skinned men generate no revenue. And Zuri says forgiveness is neighbour to the divine.”

“She has you quoting scripture now? Is she your companion, or are you hers?”

“She’s my friend,” said Savine. The only one she trusted. “Introducing us may be the best thing you have ever done for me.”

“We all need someone we can rely on.”

“Even you?”

“Please. I can’t get out of bed without your mother’s help.”

Savine ground her teeth. What she really wanted was to wheel her father off a bridge and stop somewhere for another sniff of pearl dust, even though her face was still numb from the last one. But the parapets on the bridges were too high, and there was nowhere private to snort on the Kingsway, so for the time being the torture would have to continue. It was what her father was known for, after all. Truly, as he loved to say, life is the misery we endure between disappointments. She wheeled him on, between the magnificent sculptures of Casamir the Steadfast and his Arch Lector, Zoller.

“You should try not to blame her.” Her father paused a moment, and Savine watched the breeze stir the white hairs on his liver-spotted pate. “Or at any rate, you should blame me just as much.”

“I have more than enough blame to go around, believe me.”

“I thought forgiveness was neighbour to the divine?”

“Zuri thinks so but I couldn’t say. Neither of them lives anywhere near me.”

The scaffolding was coming down from the final statue before the shimmering greenery of the park. The king most recently deceased. Jezal the First, that personification of vaguely well-meaning indecision,