Last Argument of Kings (The First Law, #3)

by Joe Abercrombie

I can be patient. The one good thing about every step being an ordeal. You soon learn how to tread carefully.

Below were written lines of small, dense script. Too small for Glokta to read from where he was sitting, but he knew what they said. Wife was once a whore. Partial to young men. Drinks too much for his good. Murdered a servant in a rage. Gambling debts he cannot cover. Secrets. Rumours. Lies. The tools of this noble trade. Three hundred and twenty names, and just as many sordid little stories, each one to be picked at, and dug out, and jabbed our way. Politics. Truly, the work of the righteous. So why do I do this? Why?

The Lords’ Round heaped with richly dressed corpses, every great nobleman in the Union and all twelve members of the Closed Council. Each stabbed in the back by the man beside. The ugly truth of government…

“Don’t mind him. He’s still young enough to think that rudeness wins respect.”

Strange, how it’s that much easier to kill folk when you’ve got someone telling you to do it.

“Shame,” said Grim. “What is?” “Waste of a bell.” Dow blinked at him. “Waste of a bell, I swear! You got yourself a lot to say all of a sudden, and you know what? I think I liked you better before. Waste of a bell? You lost your mind, boy?” Grim shrugged. “Southerners might want one, when they get here.” “They can fucking take a dive for the clapper then, can’t they!” And Dow snatched up One-Arm’s spear and strode over to the open gate, one hand stuffed inside his stolen cloak, grumbling to himself. “Waste of a bell… by the fucking dead…”

Logen hardly looked as if there was much laughter in him, or much hope either. He looked like a man who had run out of choices.

Still, his words had their effect on the city watch. The three men backed away, for some reason grinning as if the whole business had gone just as they planned, leaving Jezal to the unwanted approval of the crowd. “Well done, lad!” “Good thing someone’s got some guts.” “What did he say his name was?” “Captain Luthar!” roared Bayaz suddenly, causing Jezal to jerk round halfway through sheathing his steels. “Captain Jezal dan Luthar, the winner of last year’s Contest, just now returned from his adventures in the west! Luthar, the name!”

Bayaz organized the scene? Why would he boost Jezal's reputation? Likely going to use him as a political piece?

“Well, then. I would like to thank you, Captain Luthar, for the part you played in that little adventure of ours.” “How dare you, you magical arsehole? The entire business was a colossal, painful, disfiguring waste of my time, and a failure to boot.” But what Jezal really said was, “Of course, yes.” He took the old man’s hand, preparing to give it a limp shake. “It has been an honour.”

Seeing Ardee again, after all that time apart, was undoubtedly an exception. All his carefully prepared conversation evaporated in that one instant, leaving him as empty-headed as he had been when he first laid eyes on her.

The effect she had on him was, if anything, stronger now than it used to be. Then there had not been all the weight of expectation, all the long daydreaming and anticipation out in the wilderness.

“I love you.” She gave a kind of cough, as if she was about to be sick, and she slowly shook her head. “Why?” He wasn’t sure he knew. He wasn’t sure what he meant, or how he felt any more. He wanted to start again, but he didn’t know how. The whole thing was an inexplicable nightmare from which he hoped soon to wake.

“I am not a big enough man to compete in this contest, even should I wish to. But I am big enough to get something from it. I intend to get what I can.” Straight to business, then, for once. No need to talk about the weather, or how the children are, or the relative merits of different-coloured ducks.

“Cleverness is no guarantee of sensible behaviour.

It can be a fearsome weapon, patience. One that few men ever learn to use. A hard thing, to keep your mind on killing once you’re out of danger and your blood’s cooled off. But Logen had always had the trick of it.

Logen reached round and clamped his hand tight over the guard’s mouth, cut his throat quick and hard, deep enough that he felt the blade scraping on his neck bones. He jerked and struggled for a moment, but Logen held him tight, tight as a lover, and he made no more than a quiet gurgle. Logen felt blood over his hands, hot and sticky.

“and I said when I came down from the hills to seek you out,” and he lifted up his arm to point at Logen. “That you’re a man more beloved of the moon than any other!” Dogman looked over at Logen, and Logen shrugged. “Who’s to say what the moon likes or doesn’t? What of it?” “What of it, he says! Hah! I could watch him kill the whole world, and a thing of beauty it would be! The what of it is, I have a plan. It flowed up with the cold springs under the mountains, and was carried along in the streams under the stones, and washed up on the shore of the sacred lake right beside me, while I was dipping my toes in the frosty.”

There’s a place up in the mountains, a place well loved by the moon. A strong valley, and watched over by the dead of my family, and the dead of my people, and the dead of the mountains, all the way back until when the world was made.”

He had never felt like this about a woman before, not ever. Surely it was love. It had to be. But was love enough? How long would it last? Marriage, after all, was forever, and forever was a very long time.

“The king is dead!” he wailed, the tortured echoes ringing from the towers and buildings around the square. Jezal could only grimace. It was just his luck. Now no one would be cheering for him.

He had a big grin on his face, just as friendly as you like, but that meant nothing. Logen had known plenty of men who could grin while they planned to kill you. He’d done it himself, and more than once.

Seemed he’d let himself forget what the North was like. Or he’d let himself pretend it would be different. Now he saw his mistake. He’d made a trap for himself, years ago. He’d made a great heavy chain, link by bloody link, and he’d bound himself up in it. Somehow he’d been offered the chance to get free, a chance he didn’t come near to deserving, but instead he’d blundered back in, and now things were apt to get bloody.

You can never have too many knives, his father had told him. Unless they’re pointed at you, and by people who don’t like you much.

One of my greatest pleasures is a good cut of meat, and the bloodier the better. Just show them the flame, I always tell my cook. Just show it to them.” Funny. I tell my Practicals to start the same way.

vast majority of men would far rather be told what to do than make their own choices. Obedience is easy.”

the power lies with the Open Council, not the Closed. With the nobles, not the bureaucrats. With the many, not the few.

Hierarchy Easter Egg??!?

Produce this bastard, if you can, so-called First of the Magi! Work your magic!” “No magic is needful,” sneered Bayaz. “The king’s son is already with us in the chamber.” Gasps of consternation from the gallery, sighs of amazement from the councillors, stunned silence from the Closed Council and their aides, every eye fixed on Bayaz’s pointing finger as he swept out his hand towards the wall. “No other man than Colonel Jezal dan Luthar!” The spasm began in Glokta’s toeless foot, shot up his ruined leg, set his twisted spine shivering from his arse right to his skull, made his face twitch like an angry jelly, made his few teeth rattle in his empty gums, set his eyelid flickering fast as a fly’s wings. The echoes of Bayaz’s last utterance whispered round the suddenly silent hall. “Luthar, Luthar, Luthar…” You must be fucking joking.

People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.

Not looking much, not saying much, not seeming much, that’s a good first step in being dangerous,

His crown must go with armour. It must go with weapons. It must go with steel. Now do you understand?” The Jeweller nodded slowly. “I believe so, my Lord.” “Good. And one more thing.” “My Lord has but to name it.” “Give it a big-arsed diamond.”

Torlichorm gave a syrupy smile, of the kind a wet-nurse might use while trying to calm a troublesome infant. “So you see, your Majesty, we cannot possibly consider Colonel West as—” Jezal’s empty goblet bounced off Torlichorm’s bald forehead with a loud crack and clattered away into the corner of the room. The old man gave a wail of shock and pain and slid from his chair, blood running from a long gash across his face.

Plans have a way of coming apart when you lean on ’em.”

“Rare rages render a man frightening. Common ones render him ridiculous.”

It’s hard to be done a favour by a man you hate. It’s hard to hate him so much afterwards. Losing an enemy can be worse than losing a friend, if you’ve had him for long enough.

god DAMN.

“It ain’t ever as simple, is it, as a man is just good or bad?

“Very good,” said Bayaz, nodding thoughtfully to himself. “I believe that you are ready for your wedding.” The peculiar thing, now that Jezal had a rare moment to think about it, was that he had not, in any way of which he was aware, agreed to get married.

He was gradually starting to realise that the more powerful a man became, the fewer choices he really had.

Trussed ’em up in the hard blue dawn, first streaks of light just stabbing across the black sky, and he’d doused them all with oil and set a spark to them. One by one he’d done it. So the others could see what was coming and set to screaming before their turn. Dogman didn’t much take to seeing men on fire. He didn’t like hearing their shrieks and their fat crackling. He didn’t smile at a nose-full of the sick-sweet stink of their burning meat. But he didn’t think of trying to stop it neither. There was a time for soft opinions, and this weren’t it. Mercy and weakness are the same thing in war, and there’s no prizes for nice behaviour.

If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person?

He’d played at being a different man, but it had all been lies. The hardest kind to see through. The kind you tell yourself.

“Last Argument of Kings” —Inscribed on his cannons by Louis XIV

You can have enemies you never really meet, Logen had plenty. You can kill men you don’t know, he’d done it often. But you can’t truly hate a man without loving him first, and there’s always a trace of that love left over.

Sometimes it can be better to live with the fear of it, than to die doing it,

“A barbaric custom,” muttered Jalenhorm, his thoughts evidently taking a similar course. “Really?” growled Pike. “I was just now thinking what a civilised one it is.” “Civilised? Two men butchering each other before a crowd?” “Better than a whole crowd butchering each other. A problem solved with only one man killed? That’s a war ended well, to my mind.”

“People rarely get what they deserve.”

There’s nothing worth less than what men think of you after you’re back in the mud.

Jezal was beginning to doubt that anyone in a position of high authority ever really knew what they were doing. The best one could hope for was to maintain some shred of an illusion that one might.

Fearlessness, as Logen Ninefingers had once observed, is a fool’s boast.

I chose glory and success. The box did not contain what was written on the lid.”

It can be a terrible curse for a man to get everything he ever dreamed of. If the shining prizes turn out somehow to be empty baubles, he is left without even his dreams for comfort.