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Logen put a hand on his shoulder. “Jezal, wait. Wait. You know me.” “Of course. I like to think so.” “Alright. Tell me something, then. Am I…” He struggled to find the right words. “Am I… an evil man?” “You?” Jezal stared at him, confused. “You’re the best man I know.”
Perhaps we’ll have some answers, at least, before the end. I always dreamed of dying well-informed.
The First of the Magi watched him, the same look in his bright eyes that a man might have while watching an interesting beetle. “I must admit that you fascinate me, Superior. Your life would seem to be entirely unbearable. And yet you fight so very, very hard to stay alive. With every weapon and stratagem. You simply refuse to die.”
“I am ready to die.” Glokta returned his gaze, like for like. “But I refuse to lose.”
“I suppose I should congratulate you on a hand well played,” muttered Glokta bitterly. “Bah.” Bayaz dismissed it with a wave. “Forcing a clutch of primitives together under that cretin Harod and making them act like civilised men. Keeping the Union in one piece through the civil war and bringing that fool Arnault to the throne. Guiding that coward Casamir to the conquest of Angland. Those were hands well played. This was nothing. I hold all the cards and always will do. I have—” I tire of this. “And blah, blah, fucking blah. The stench of self-satisfaction is becoming quite suffocating. If you
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Kill you?” asked Bayaz mildly. “And rob myself of your winning sense of humour?”
“Then I fear you have no choice. But why would you refuse me? I offer you the chance to help me forge a new age.” To bury my hands to the elbow in your dirty work. “To be a great man. The very greatest of men.” To bestride the Closed Council like a crippled colossus. “To leave your likeness set in stone on the Kingsway.” Where its hideousness can make the children cry. Once they clear away the rubble and the corpses, of course. “To shape the course of a nation.”
“They are treating you well?” A voice strangely familiar, strangely different. “Yes, sir.” “Is there anything you need?” “A kiss from a good woman?” “I would love to oblige you, but I fear I’m only a king. We’re a great deal more common than good women.”
“Have you come to take me on another tour of sewers, death and torture?” “A repeat of that performance will probably never be possible, alas. I seem to have used up all my friends and most of my enemies in that one throw.”
“I’ve spent most of my life disappointed. But not in you. It’s a hard world. No one gets what they deserve.”
And so I save two lives. How much evil can that possibly outweigh? Yet it is something on the right side of the scales, at least. Every man needs something on the right side of the scales.
Power makes all things right. That is my first law, and my last. That is the only law that I acknowledge.”
Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say he never listens.
Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say he’s a cunt.
The sad fact was, he supposed, that love on its own was nothing like enough.
“We are done. Looks as if I’ll never be a better man, but I can try not to be a worse. I can try that much, at least.”
“Government is tyranny. At its best it is dressed in pretty colours.”
“I knew that you would say so, because although I know that you are arrogant, ignorant, and ungrateful, I know this also… you are a coward. Remember that. I trust that this is one lesson you will not ignore.”
Dogman watched him go, teeth gritted, thinking how he wanted to hit someone, but not sure who. There was no one here but him, now, anyway. Him and the dead. But maybe that’s what happens once the fighting stops, to a man who knows nothing but fighting. He fights himself.
Grey morning time, out in the cold, wet gardens, and the Dogman was just stood there, thinking about how things used to be better.
“Still. You see now that not dancing is the least of it. You should not have to do… this.” “I want to do it.” She took a firm grip on his face and twisted it, somewhat painfully, so he was looking straight into hers. “I want to do something. I want to be useful. I want someone to need me. Can you understand that?”
Queen Terez looked down her nose at Glokta as he lurched into her sunny salon, without the slightest attempt to hide her utter disgust and contempt. As though she saw a cockroach crawling into her regal presence. But we will see. We know well the path, after all. We have followed it ourselves, and we have dragged so many others after. Pride comes first. Then pain. Humility follows hard upon it. Obedience lies just beyond.
The purpose of power is not to be gracious.
Glokta could hear her scared breathing as he settled himself in the remaining chair, leaned his cane against the scarred tabletop, and frowned into her face. “I am still wondering whether, in the next few days, I will receive that letter you spoke of. You know the one. The one you meant for Sult to read. The one that lays out the history of my self-indulgent little mercy to you. The one that you made sure will be sent to the Arch Lector… in the event of your death. Will it find its way onto my desk, now, do you suppose? A final irony.”
“I hope you will accept my apology. I only wanted to warn you about the Gurkish. If you can find it in your heart to be merciful—” “Did you expect me to be merciful once?” “No,” she whispered. “Then what, do you suppose, are the chances of my making the same mistake twice? Never come back, I said. Not ever.”
First it is done to us, then we do it to others, then we order it done. Such is the way of things.
“Please. Friends are people one pretends to like in order to make life bearable. Men like us have no need of such indulgences. It is our enemies by which we are measured.”
“Does the devil know he is a devil?” —Elizabeth Madox Roberts
Logen nodded towards the Maker’s sword, lying on the boards just next to Dow’s boot. “Don’t suppose you fancy giving a man a fair chance, and letting me have that blade, eh?” Dow grinned wider than ever. “What’s my name? White Dow?”
But then say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say that—
