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

by Joe Abercrombie

“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.

Once, out in the Far Country, I met a fellow called Lamb, who had travelled hundreds of miles, facing down Ghosts and mercenaries and Dragon People and every danger searching for his children. Whatever the odds, he simply… would not be cowed. I think about him often. I wish I was more like him, but every day out there, I was scared.

“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.”

don’t see it. If everyone knew you chose the kings, and you had all the power, they might get it in their heads to take it from you. I reckon you’d sooner stay behind the curtain, where it’s safe, and have others do the burning.”

She forced herself to grin back. “Oh, me, too.” And she stabbed him in the throat. The blade hardly made a sound as it punched into the crosspiece where his neck met his shoulder, and straight out again along with a spurt of blood that soaked her hand.

He’d watched Bethod flung from the walls. Now he watched Bethod’s grandson flung from about the same place, and crash down in about the same place, crumpled in the wet grass where the Circle had been marked out that day.

Bethod’s line ends with you.” “Ah.” For some reason, Calder had the ghost of a smile at the last. He leaned forwards and spoke so softly only she could hear. “So you don’t see everything.”

The very personification of ruthlessness, a puppeteer who used kings as his marionettes!”

She saw Judge drop. Just a glimpse of her bloody snarl before she was gone in a mass of clawing limbs and flapping cloth.

“Not everyone,” he said, then produced a dagger from behind his back and stabbed Forest in the chest. At the same moment Orso felt himself gripped from behind, a blade pressed into his throat.

“I wish your father had lived to see them.” Leo’s mother dabbed at teary eyes. “He doted on you. Always saying how proud he was of his son.” That was the story they always told, but Leo remembered it differently. His father had never been there, and when he had been he was stiff and distant, and when Leo needed love he’d got empty sayings about being a man, and dry rot about the principles of the Union.

“Do you believe…” His voice sounded much like anyone else’s, whispering. “In redemption?” “I don’t fucking care.” “You’re young. Give it time.”

“I saw a wolf eat the sun.”

“Ah, why do I do this? Why?” Glokta gazed down at the squares board. “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.”

The Life of Dab Sweet. She pulled it out, and it fell open on the table at that favourite page. That favourite picture. The great plains, grass going on for ever. A place where you can make yourself anew. Where you can go as far as your dreams can take you.

She thought of a wide sky over a far country. She smiled as she strode off into the night.

we were all puppets. Bayaz pulled the strings, and always had. He controlled the banks, and their roots ate into everything. A web of debts, and secrets, and favours, deeper than you can imagine. Valint and Balk.”

“You forget, I have some experience with your kind. The best weapon against an Eater… is another.”

Zuri twisted Sulfur’s head back, one hand hooking his top jaw, one hooking the bottom. She snarled as she began to drag them apart, his eyes bulging, his mouth gaping wider and wider until with a snapping crunch she ripped his face wide open, blood showering, tearing his bottom jaw from his head until it hung on strings of gristle.

Hildi dan Valint or Hildi dan Balk?”

We have had our differences, but you remain the woman I most admire. And, let’s be honest, the only one I’ve ever loved.” He was gratified to see a tear slide down her cheek.

I’ll chain you up in strikes and riots. I’ll bury you in a blizzard of pamphlets. Have you seen how popular I am these days? Threaten the Mother of the Nation? Depose the Darling of the Slums? You’d have another Great Change on your hands, supposing the army fought for you. But bear in mind, their oath isn’t to you, it’s to the king. And you are not king, Leo. You’re less king than I am.”

“How can you sit there with a straight face, talking of the horrors of the old regime? You were the old regime! It

“Maybe, after all… I’m the villain.”

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 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 upon the beaches of the North. A tide of blood. A flood whose red waters would not recede.

she saw a circle of runes, and in the circle of runes she saw a black door, and beyond the door a figure rose from the seething sea, a figure made of blinding light, and his feet left smouldering footsteps in the shingle, and he spoke in thunder.

“I am returned.”