The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness, #2)

by Joe Abercrombie

“Your Majesty, we are not here to set right all the world’s wrongs.” Orso stared back at him. “What are we here for, then?” Bayaz neither smiled nor frowned. “To ensure that we benefit from them.”

Murcatto’s Minister of Whispers, Shylo Vitari, is mounting an all-encompassing campaign of bribery and threats, blackmail and coercion, while printed sheets are flung from the rooftops and painted slogans spring up faster than we can scrub them off.”

“One cannot despise a thing without acknowledging its importance.”

Trouble with the good fight, I find… once the fight starts, the good stops.”

“So persuasive. So compelling. So very… what’s that word… charismatic. Loved as only politicians free from power—and therefore from disappointment—ever can be.

But if you’re furious whenever the Closed Council does something infuriating, you’ll be furious all the time. Rare anger can be inspiring. Frequent anger becomes contemptible.”

“I must confess I have always had some sympathy with villains. Heroism makes fine entertainment but sooner or later someone has to get things done.”

It was what her father was known for, after all. Truly, as he loved to say, life is the misery we endure between disappointments.

People like things that are simple. Black and white. Good and evil. They want to make a choice and tell themselves they were right. But as His Eminence is fond of saying, the real world is painted in greys. The truth is complicated, full of mixed emotions and blurred outcomes and each-way bets. The truth… is a hard sell.”

Shivers held her hand. Held so tight it hurt. “Can’t lose you, Rikke.” The grey stubble on his grey cheek shifted as he clenched his jaw. “Can’t do it.”

“I’ve got another eye. There’s just one o’ you.”

“You don’t know what I was.” Shivers fussed at that ring with the red stone he wore on his little finger. “I cared for nothing. Hated everything. Came to serve your father ’cause of all the men I hated, he was the one I hated least. I walked in a nightmare.” He shut his eyes. Or the one that could see. The other showed a slit of gleaming metal still. “You were so sick, then. No one thought you’d last another winter. Your mother dead and your father grieving. So sick, but so full of hope. You trusted me. Me, with nothing in him to trust. You sucked goat’s milk from a cloth, in my arms. Your father said I was the least likely nursemaid he ever saw. Said I brought you back from the brink.” He looked at her then, and a tear streaked from his good eye. “But it was you brought me back.”

Jurand, with his caution and good sense. Jurand, with his endless patience and support. Jurand, with the fine shape of his jaw, and his hair falling in that artless mess, and the perfect definition of his lips… Leo shook himself.

“Back to glory!” Barezin punched his palm as if it was nowhere near glorious enough. “Men of action! Men who can make the Union great again!”

Old men, I swear. They get weak and stubborn both at once, so they make no good ideas but won’t be shifted from the bad ones.”

The Bloody-Nine was the worst man in the world to find yourself in the Circle with. But Caul Shivers came a close second.

“This is Zuri, my companion.” “Is it?” Rikke narrowed her eyes, then slid them, sly as a cat, towards Savine. “Sure you aren’t hers?” “I have heard it said God puts us all where we are meant to be,” said Zuri.

They say belief is righteous, but to Muslan only doubt was divine. From doubt flows curiosity, and knowledge, and progress. From belief flows only ignorance and decay.

The Arch Lector closed his eyes. Crushing news, especially for him, but Orso could have sworn he saw a wry smile at the corner of the old Inquisitor’s mouth. “Body found floating by the docks,” he murmured.

No ceremony, no medals, no grand speech and no cheering crowds. From the pinnacle of power to a toothless old cripple in one brief conversation. The chair squeaked from the room and the doors were shut upon Sand dan Glokta. The era of Old Sticks was at an end.

Calder gave a disgusted sigh as he watched the King of the Northmen swagger towards the steps. “The dead save me from the fucking young.” “No getting away from ’em, sadly,” muttered Clover. “The older you get, the more of ’em there are.”

“I understand cowards,” said Pike softly. “I used to be one. Who among us never had a weak moment, after all? It cannot all be darkness. We must have a little mercy.” He leaned sideways to whisper it. “As long as no one sees.”

One might have expected Corporal Tunny to dive for cover, or, indeed, to never have left cover, but instead he was doing his best to shield the Steadfast Standard with his body.

At their front, arms folded, metal eye glinting through his long hair, stood Caul Shivers.

Clover caught him by the jaw and hissed the words in his face. “Giving you your last lesson. Those big names o’ the past you’re always wanking over. Shama Heartless. Black Dow. The Bloody-Nine. The dead know they were bastards, but they earned those names. They tore ’em from the world with their hands and their will. Nightfall?” Clover turned his head and spat into the sea. “What the fuck is that? You were born with it. All you have you’ve been handed. Well, here’s the thing, boy…” And he caught hold of that big diamond and tore the great chain that Bethod once wore over Stour’s head. “What’s easily given… is easily took away.”