Before They Are Hanged (The First Law, #2)

by Joe Abercrombie

It will not be for much longer, I assure you.” Just until the sea dries up, the sky falls in, and devils roam the earth.

Well don’t speak too soon…

Out here in the wild, though, the rules were different. One could not simply walk away from a man one disliked, then do one’s best to avoid him, belittle him in company, and insult him behind his back. Out here you were stuck with the companions you had, and, being stuck with him, Jezal had come slowly to realise that Ninefingers was just a man, after all.

“What’s a battle like?” he asked. “Battles are like men. No two are ever quite the same.” “How do you mean?” “Imagine waking up at night to hear a crashing and a shouting, scrambling out of your tent into the snow with your trousers falling down, to see men all around you killing one another. Nothing but moonlight to see by, no clue who’re enemies and who’re friends, no weapon to fight with.” “Confusing,” said Jezal. “No doubt. Or imagine crawling in the mud, between the stomping boots, trying to get away but not knowing where to go, with an arrow in your back and a sword cut across your arse, squealing like a pig and waiting for a spear to stick you through, a spear you won’t even see coming.” “Painful,” agreed Jezal. “Very. Or imagine standing in a circle of shields no more than ten strides across, all held by men roaring their loudest. There’s just you and one other man in there, and that man’s won a reputation for being the hardest bastard in the North, and only one of you can leave alive.”

Every man who’s worth a damn feels fear. It’s the use you make of it that counts.”

“Look the fool, eh? I see.” Jezal had built his whole life around trying to appear the cleverest, the strongest, the most noble. It was an intriguing idea, that a man might choose to look like less than he was.

Respect costs you nothing, and nothing gets a man killed quicker than confidence.”

“Neither do I,” grumbled Ninefingers, taking a step towards the fallen tree. “But you have to be real—” “That’s far enough!”

have orders to find a certain group of people, a group of people wandering out in the middle of nowhere, far from the travelled roads! An old bald bastard with a sickly-looking boy, some stuck-up Union fool, a scarred whore, and an ape of a Northerner! You seen a crowd that might fit that description?” “If I’m the whore,” shouted Ninefingers, “who’s the Northerner?”

Where’s the other one, eh? The Navigator?” “No idea,” growled Bayaz, “unfortunately. If anyone dies, it should be him.”

“We’re a lot different, you and me. Different in all kind of ways. I see you don’t have much respect for my kind, or for me in particular, and I don’t much blame you. The dead know I got my shortcomings, and I ain’t entirely ignorant of ’em. You may think you’re a clever man, and I’m a stupid one, and I daresay you’re right. There’s sure to be a very many things that you know more about than I do. But when it comes to fighting, I’m sorry to say, there’s few men with a wider experience than me. No offence, but we both know you’re not one of ’em. No one made me the leader, but this is the task that needs doing.”

“It always amazes me, how love blooms in the least likely places, and between the least likely people. A rose, forcing its way through the stony ground.”

“Big men, small men, thin men, fat men, clever men, stupid men, they all respond the same to a fist in the guts. One minute you think you’re the most powerful man in the world. The next you can’t even breathe by yourself. Some kinds of power are nothing but tricks of the mind.

“Sometimes, when someone lives in danger for too long, the only time they feel alive is when death’s breathing on their shoulder.”

A choice between killing and dying is no choice at all.

“The cavalry, they’ve returned!” Lord Smund started eagerly forward. “Wait!” hissed West, to no effect. His eyes strained into the grey. He saw the outlines of horsemen, coming steadily through the gloom. The shapes of their armour, of their saddles, of their helmets were those of the King’s Own, and yet there was something in the way they rode—slouching, loose. West drew his sword. “Protect the Prince,” he muttered, taking a step towards Ladisla. “You there!” shouted Lord Smund at the foremost horseman. “Prepare your men for another—” The rider’s sword chopped into his skull with a hollow clicking sound. A spray of blood went up, black in the white mist, and the horsemen broke into a charge, screaming at the tops of their voices. Terrifying, eerie, inhuman sounds.

“They've come back! My warriors! They have come back to me from the land of the dead! Forward my warriors!” “Lord Okkoto, listen!” “Forward to the pool of the Forest Spirit!” “Okkoto. No wait! No, Lord Okkoto! Your warriors haven't come back to you! Those are humans, wearing the skins of your warriors to hide their scent! It's a trick! Don't you understand?!”

“He is not fit for battle that has never seen his own blood flow, who has not heard his teeth crunch under the blow of an opponent, or felt the full weight of his adversary upon him.” —Roger of Howden

In some ways everything had changed. In others it was just the same as ever. Here he was still, facedown in the muck with a sore neck from looking up. Ten years older and not a day better off. He could hardly remember what his ambitions used to be, but this hadn’t ever been among ’em, he was sure of that. All that wind blown past, all that snow fallen, all that water flowed by. All that fighting, all that marching, all that waste.

“We supposed to fight all this lot? When do we get a rest?” Grim shrugged his shoulders, squeezed his lips together like he was thinking about it. “When we’re dead?” And wasn’t that the sorry truth.

Aint no rest for the...

“We taught those Gurkish fuckers a lesson they won’t soon forget, eh, Superior?” “What lesson?” muttered Severard. What lesson indeed? The dead learn nothing.

“Ah! The author of our woes! Have you come to feed your guilt, Superior?” “No. I came to see if I have any.” “And do you?” A good question. Do I? He looked down at a young man, lying on dirty straw by the wall, wedged in between two others. His face was waxy pale, eyes glassy, lips moving rapidly as he mumbled some meaningless nonsense to himself. His leg was off just above the knee, the stump bound with a bloody dressing, a belt buckled tight round the thigh. His chances of survival? Slim to none. A last few hours in agony and squalor, listening to the groans of his fellows. A young life, snuffed out long before his time, and blah, blah, blah. Glokta raised his eyebrows. He felt nothing but a mild distaste, no more than he might have, had the dying man been a heap of rubbish. “No,” he said.

He tortured himself with the thought of her laughing at some other man’s jokes, smiling into some other man’s face, kissing some other man’s mouth. She would never want him now, that was sure. No one would want him.

“Anyone can face ease and success with confidence. It is the way we face trouble and misfortune that defines us. Self-pity goes with selfishness, and there is nothing more to be deplored in a leader than that. Selfishness belongs to children, and to half-wits. A great leader puts others before himself. You would be surprised how acting so makes it easier to bear one’s own troubles. In order to act like a King, one need only treat everyone else like one.”

You treat folk the way you’d want to be treated, and you can’t go far wrong. That’s what my father told me. Forgot that advice, for a long time, and I done things I can never make up for.” He gave a long sigh. “Still, it doesn’t hurt to try. My experience? You get what you give, in the end.”

There was something calming in the repetitive droning of the old man’s deep voice, especially now the sun was breaking through the clouds.

You read my mind…

You do what you have to.” “You mean…” “What you have to.” She shrugged. “I’m not proud, but I’m not ashamed either. Pride and shame, neither one will feed you.

“Honour, eh? What the hell is that anyway? Every man thinks it’s something different. You can’t drink it. You can’t fuck it. The more of it you have the less good it does you, and if you’ve got none at all, you don’t miss it.” He shook his head. “But some men think it’s the best thing in the world.”

It was a harsh lesson, but a broken face had done that boy a power of good. It had taught him some respect, and a lot quicker than any amount of talk. It had taught him to be realistic, and that had to be a good thing.

But at least he was out of the cart, and that was something. Small things seemed to make him very happy these days.

The mutilated stumps were grey and dry, splintered edges still showing the marks of saws. “They look as if they were cut down months ago.” “Many long years, my boy. When Glustrod seized the city, he had them all felled to feed his furnaces.” “Then why have they not rotted?” “Even rot is a kind of life. There is no life here.”

Men must sometimes do what they do not like if they are to be remembered. It is through struggle, not ease, that fame and honour are won. It is through conflict, not peace, that wealth and power are gained.

He was already well known to the only five people within a hundred miles. Besides, he was starting to wonder if a long, poor life in utter obscurity would really be such a terrible thing.

Find your folk, look no further and be contented. Little else is of import.

A life of hard work with the woman he loved beside him? A rented house in an unfashionable part of town, with cheap furniture but a cosy fire? No fame, no power, no wealth, but a warm bed with Ardee in it, waiting for him.… That hardly seemed like such a terrible fate now that he had looked death in the face, when he was living on a bowl of porridge a day and feeling grateful to get it, when he was sleeping alone out in the wind and the rain.

The only thing worse than a city full of people is a city with no people at all.

He should’ve known by now. Only friends get left behind. Enemies are always at your heels.

it still lay nearby, the bright blade shining in the shaft of light from high above. Ninefingers stooped and picked it up. “You can never have too many knives.” “No? What if you fall in a river and can’t swim for all that iron?” He looked puzzled for a moment, then he shrugged and put it carefully back down on the ground. “Fair point.”

They could not have expected vengeance to find them where they lived, and breathed, and toiled, but they would learn.

“Come,” he whispered. They all were welcome. They scattered for the racks, seizing their spiked swords, and their sharp axes, and the Bloody-Nine laughed to watch them. Armed or not, their death was a thing already decided. It was written into the cavern in lines of fire and lines of shadow. Now he would write it in lines of blood.

“Die!” he roared, and the blade made circles, savage and beautiful, the letter on the metal burning red and leaving bright trails behind. And where the circles passed, everything would be made right. The Shanka would scream and gibber, and the pieces of them would scatter, and they would be sliced and divided as neatly as meat on the butcher’s block, as dough on the baker’s block, as the corn stubble left by the farmer’s scythe, all according to a perfect design.

More silence. He could see her outline in the moonlight, sitting near the wall, his coat wrapped round her shoulders, damp hair sticking spiky from her head, perhaps the slightest gleam of a yellow eye, watching him. He cursed to himself under his breath. He was no good at talking, never had been. Probably none of that meant anything to her. Still, at least he’d tried. “You want to fuck?” He looked up, mouth hanging open, not sure if he could’ve heard right. “Eh?”

Click, tap, pain, that was the rhythm of Glokta’s walking. The confident click of his right heel, the tap of his cane on the echoing tiles of the hallway, then the long scrape of his left foot with the familiar pain in the knee, arse and back. Click, tap, pain.

War killed a lot of men, it seemed. But it gave a few a second chance.

“When did you get here?” “How did you get here?” “Were you with Ladisla?” “Were you at the battle?” “Hold on,” said Jalenhorm, “give him a minute!” West waved him down. “I got here this morning, and would have come to you at once apart from a crucial meeting with a bath and a razor, and then one with Marshal Burr. I was with Ladisla, at the battle, and I got here by walking across country, with the help of five Northmen, a girl, and a man with no face.”

“Leave the fighting to those with less sense.”

“Thinking and walking? Pray do not strain yourself, Captain Luthar.”

A simple stick was good enough for my master. He needed nothing more. A length of wood does not by itself make a man wise, or noble, or powerful, any more than a length of steel does. Power comes from the flesh, my boy, and from the heart, and from the head. From the head most of all.”

“Weapons are dangerous, to those who do not understand them. With Ferro Maljinn’s bow I might shoot myself in the foot, if I did not know how to use it. With Captain Luthar’s steel I might cut my ally, had I not the skill. The greater the weapon, the greater the danger. I have the proper respect for this thing, believe me, but to fight our enemies, we need a powerful weapon indeed.”

they satisfied themselves with burning down half the village.” He snorted. “Their own damn village! That’s what an idiot does when he gets angry. He destroys whatever’s nearest, even if it’s his own house!

A horrible death with honour is far preferable to a long life in obscurity, of course.

The damage was done now, and there could be no going back. Perhaps he was an uglier man, but he was a better man too, and at least, as Logen would have said, he was still alive.

They flowed out from the trees at the far end of the valley, near to the river, spreading out like the dark stain creeping from a slit wrist.