08 A Little Hatred: Book One (The Age of Madness)

‘Huh. Would’ve thought famous wizards would ride up front with the big folk, rather than getting stuck at the back with the dross.’

Bayaz smiled. He was a hard bastard to rattle, the First of the Magi. ‘The figurehead goes at the front of the ship. Braves the terror of wind and waves, takes the risks and reaps the glory. But it’s an unnoticed fellow hidden away near the back who does the steering.’ He smiled up towards the head of the column. ‘No leader worth a damn ever led from the front.’

‘Words to live by, I reckon,’ murmured Rikke.

‘The last wisdom I can offer you for the moment, I fear.’ And Bayaz pulled his horse up at the grand front steps of a building. Vast, it was, somewhere between fortress and temple with huge pillars at the front and carved masonry all over but precious little in the way o’ windows.

‘What’s this place?’ She didn’t much like its looks. Lots of serious people going in and out, stepping around some well-dressed fellow with papers dangling from one limp hand, the strangest horrified look on his face. ‘A school for wizards?’

‘Not quite,’ said the First of the Magi. ‘It is a bank.’

‘Master Bayaz?’ An ordinary-looking man had come up to hold the wizard’s bridle.

‘Ah! This is Yoru Sulfur, a member of the Order of Magi.’

‘I’m Rikke,’ said Rikke, ‘rhymes with—’

‘Yes,’ said Sulfur, smiling up. ‘The Dogman’s daughter. The one blessed with the Long Eye.’

Rikke was caught between suspicion and satisfaction that her legend had come ahead of her. ‘Or cursed with it, I guess.’

‘I hope we might speak more later,’ said Bayaz. ‘Young women born with the Long Eye are rare indeed in these latter days.’

‘Almost as rare as Magi,’ she grunted.

Sulfur smiled wider, his eyes never leaving her face, and she realised they were different colours, one blue, one green. ‘We relics of the Age of Magic really should stick together.’

‘Can’t see why not. I’m hardly besieged by admirers.’

‘Not yet, perhaps.’ Bayaz gave her one last thoughtful glance. Like a butcher assessing a shepherd’s flock and judging what to offer. ‘But who can say what the future holds?’

‘Aye,’ murmured Rikke as she watched him climb the steps with his curly haired sidekick, ‘that’d be a fine bloody trick.’

Shivers was sitting in his saddle, turning that ring he wore on his little finger around and around, glaring up at the bank with a frown hard even for him.

‘What’s your problem?’ asked Rikke.

He turned his head and spat. ‘Never trusted banks.’

The man they called Old Sticks, the king’s chief torturer, Arch Lector Glokta, hunched behind a giant desk loaded with papers, frowning as he signed one after another. Death sentences, Leo imagined, bloodlessly executed with a flick of the pen.

His Eminence made Leo wait an insultingly long time before he finally looked up, winced as he leaned to drop his pen into its bottle of ink, and smiled. On that gaunt, waxy, wasted face, etched by deep grimace-lines, a yawning gap where the four front teeth should’ve been, it was an expression as painfully unsettling as a leg bent the wrong way at the knee. If inward corruption expressed itself as outward ugliness – and Leo had always been sure it did – the Arch Lector was even more vile than the vilest things they said about him. And that was saying something. He held out his hand.

‘Forgive me, Your Grace, I cannot easily rise.’

‘Of course.’ Leo limped forward, leaning heavily on his cane. ‘Not too sprightly myself right now.’

‘You, I trust, will heal.’ Glokta’s revolting grin grew wider. ‘I fear that ship has sailed for me.’

He looked as if a stiff breeze would shred him, but his bony hand, its liver-spotted skin almost transparent, gripped far harder than Bremer dan Gorst’s great paw. You can tell a lot about a man from his handshake, his father had always said, and this old cripple’s was like a smith’s pincers.

‘I must congratulate you on your victory,’ said Glokta, after studying Leo a moment longer. ‘You have done the Crown a great service.’

‘Thank you, Your Eminence.’ Though who could’ve denied it? ‘But I didn’t do it alone. Lot of good men dead. Good friends … dead. And the cost to Angland’s coffers was huge.’ Leo pulled out the weighty scroll his mother had given him. ‘The ruling council of the province asked me to present His Majesty’s advisors with this accounting for the campaign. In the absence of any help from the Crown during the war, they expect – they demand – financial support in the aftermath.’ Leo had practised that speech on the trip and was rather pleased with how it came out. He could manage this bureaucracy business as well as anyone. But Glokta looked at the scroll as if he was being presented with a turd. His eyes moved up to Leo’s.