The Wisdom of Crowds (The Age of Madness #3)

by Joe Abercrombie

“The great are only great because we are on our knees. Let us rise up!” Elysée Loustallot

“The thing about history is you don’t know what the right side is till long afterwards, and by then it hardly matters.”

“Threats for tomorrow don’t cut very deep when today is so damn threatening.

Pain is the price of doing the right thing,

Leo used to be always restless. Following an argument had been painful. Sitting still had been torture. Now he knew what torture really was, and he was happy to wait. When every movement hurts, you come to appreciate a little stillness.

The Great Change had been a basket of dreams. A bouquet of promises. All things to all men. Which was grand until, against all expectations, the Breakers won. Then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t enough just to have a change, it had to be a change into something. Trouble was, soon as you tried to actually deliver the bastard, to mould it into policies, with costs as well as benefits, and losers as well as winners, well, nine-tenths of folk found the Great Change wasn’t the change they’d wanted after all and wouldn’t fucking have it.

It was better not to mention things unless you were sure of the right language. Every day brought new wrong words to avoid. New ideas at odds with the Great Change. Everyone was free to say what they wanted now, of course. You just had to be careful in case it got you hanged.

“Faith must be shaken from time to time, or it becomes rigid. An excuse for any outrage. I have come to believe that the righteous… should always have doubts.”

“When they have hanged all their enemies, do you think they will stop? Things will unravel and they will need people to blame. Do you read the pamphlets? They print more than ever! Attacking aristocrats, and foreign agents, and speculators and hoarders and profiteers. Attacking everyone!” She thought of the mob, the clawing arm slithering through her broken carriage window. “I will not be making myself conspicuous. I strongly advise you to do the same.”

“I loved fine things when they said the right things about me. Fine things say the wrong thing now. And we are that much closer to the Agriont. It’s a shorter trip to the Assembly.” He knew he should’ve been grateful. Instead, he felt faintly nettled. “I can walk.” “I know. But it hurts you. Why walk further than you have to?” “To prove that I can,” he grunted, gripping the handle of his crutch.

“Take it from a man who’s been there, you’re the figurehead on a ship of fools. I daresay there are good people here, and good intentions. You had a chance to make things better and, believe it or not, no one looked forward to seeing it more than I did. But you haven’t achieved a damn thing. I know this is rich coming from me, but… you’re simply poor quality. You’re a worthless bag of bluster. A spent match.”

Judge was trouble made flesh. The monster off the leash. She was madness, and fire, and violence, and all the things he’d told himself he didn’t want.

But here’s the sorry truth—if you really don’t want a thing, you don’t have to keep telling yourself so.

“Too many principles did not work for us.” “So we’ll try none at all?” Her voice had become a disbelieving shriek. “The time for half-measures is past.” Pike looked evenly back at her. “Sometimes, the only way to improve something is to destroy it, so it can be rebuilt better.” There was a time she’d thought that burned face was a perfect mask for his feelings. Now she wondered whether there were any underneath. “Sometimes, to change the world, we must first burn it down.”

“In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.” Gustave Le Bon

“The past has never interested me. For better or worse it is done, and set, and littered with disappointments as a battlefield is littered with the dead. But the future is a ploughed field, full of potential. The future we can twist into wonderful shapes.

“History is not the story of battles between right and wrong, but between one man’s right and another’s. Evil is not the opposite of good. It is what we call another man’s notion of good when it differs from ours.”

My help is not the word of Euz. It cannot protect a man from his own faults.”

“Love and hate, they’re luxuries. Poets might say they’re from the heart, but I say no. They’re lies we tell ourselves. They’re choices made. But fear,” and she lifted her trembling fist, “that’s an instinct. Fear and lust and hunger, they’re universal. The lowest insects have ’em. Fear is in the gut. It’s in the bones. It’s in the balls and the arse and the cunt. Fear and lust and hunger are what’ll bind us together and keep us on the right path. The people don’t need love or hate, Young Lion, but they always have to fear. Bear that in mind.”

“First fear’s their weapon.” Clover remembered winning a few fights before they began, using just a hard stare and the weight of his name. “Then it becomes their shield. Only thing that’ll stop their enemies trying to kill ’em. Only thing that’ll stop their friends trying to kill ’em. They get scared o’ not being feared enough, so they pile horror on horror. Turn ’emselves into monsters. And since memory tends to make the past look bigger, today’s bastards are always hunting for ways to out-bastard the bastards o’ yesteryear.”

We tell the odd fond story of the good men. The straight edges. Your Rudd Threetrees, your Dogmen. But it’s the butchers men love to sing of. The burners and the blood-spillers. Your Cracknut Whirruns and your Black Dows. Your Bloody-Nines. Men don’t dream of doing the right thing, but of ripping what they want from the world with their strength and their will.”

The baggage was ahead. Calder’s soft underbelly. The dirty horses and the mud-caked wagons that held the supplies. The smiths and the cooks. The women and the children who slogged after the men. Killing the fighters was cutting off the fingers, but hitting the baggage was cutting out the guts.

Winning battles is bad enough. Never hang around to see one lost.”

Her mother had always warned her a man is judged by his best moment, a woman by her worst.

“You are Burners. You build nothing, you make nothing. All you can do is destroy. The old regime was rotten. The people cried for freedom. What have you given them?” She gave a helpless shrug. “Corpses. I do not know where my father is. But even if I did, I would not tell you.”

“Vanity, a loud voice and a loose relationship with the truth,” whispered Zuri. “All the qualities of a successful politician.”

“I am a worm,” he whispered, head hanging, tears dripping. “An utter worm!” “Oh, no. Worms do some good.” Savine slowly sat back, lip wrinkled with disgust, the angry flush fading from her cheek. “Cowardly liar you may be, ridiculous fantasist you may be, disloyal scum you certainly are, but for reasons I cannot divine… people listen to you.”

“You spent years working for my father. You should have learned not to hang what you can use.”

The past isn’t made of facts, not really, just stories people tell to make themselves feel better. To make themselves look better.

“I could’ve told you that when I saw all the bloody flags. Flags never add to a man, d’you see, just stand in for something he’s missing. He always was a bully, and not too clever, but you can forgive a lot for a nice arse and a nice smile.”

“Because sometimes… to change the world… we must burn it down. Bayaz controlled everything. We all were pieces in his game.” He nudged one of the smallest pieces forwards into empty space. “He owned the banks, and the banks owned the merchants, owned the nobles, owned the treasury, even. The king himself danced to Bayaz’s music. The Closed Council, too. Even me, though I’m not much of a dancer these days. The Great Change was the only way I could see to cut all the puppet strings at once. The only way I could see to make us…” Glokta shrugged his bony shoulders, wincing as though even that much movement gave him pain. “Free.”

People love the idea of freedom but, in my experience, there is only so much they can be trusted with. You saw what Judge did with it. Take it far enough, freedom becomes chaos. The voice of the people… is just noise. It is the blather of the lunatics in the madhouse. It is the squeal of the pigs in the slaughterhouse. It is a choir of morons. Most of them don’t even know what they want, let alone how to get it. They need someone to tell them what to do.”

“Great folk are great ’cause they plant new footsteps. Not ’cause they blunder through the same mistakes some other bastards made.”

She saw a bald weaver, and the work on his loom was all in ruins, a million threads hanging severed. But he was stitching it back together, patience, patience, and smiling as he worked. He put out his hands, and one fell on the head of a black-haired boy, and the other on the head of a blonde-haired girl.

She saw the girl become a laughing woman, flashing lenses on her eyes, a tall hat perched on her golden curls, and the hat belched smoke, spat ash, blotted out the bleeding sun and cast the world into twilight. She blew a kiss, and the kiss became a coin, a thousand coins, a million golden chains. She offered her hand, and the fingers became iron rails, and the rails reached across the sea and made a cage, the cage that Stour had forged, and the whole North was inside.

She saw the black-haired boy became a black-haired man, and he sat on a hill of bones in a circle of fire with a grey sword across his knees, a grey sword never sheathed, a grey sword marked with one silver letter. His scarred mouth spoke, but his words were drops of blood that made a stream, that became a river, that became a sea that broke ...