Last Argument Of Kings: Book Three (The First Law 3)

‘Very well.’ Glokta waved a tired hand, ‘let us begin.’

Frost dragged the bag from the prisoner’s head. A long, lean Kantic face with deep creases around the mouth and a neatly trimmed black beard, streaked with grey. A wise, dignified face, deep-set eyes even now adjusting to the glare.

Glokta burst out laughing. Each chuckle stabbed at the base of his stiff spine and rattled his stiff neck, but he could not help himself. Even after all these years, fate can still play jokes on me.

‘Wath futhy?’ grunted Frost.

Glokta wiped his runny eye. ‘Practical Frost, we are truly honoured. Our latest prisoner is none other than Master Farrad, formerly of Yashtavit in Kanta, and more recently of a magnificent address at the top of the Kingsway. We are in the presence of the finest dentist in the Circle of the World.’ And one must appreciate the irony.

Farrad blinked into the glaring lamplight. ‘I know you.’

‘Yes.’

‘You are the one who was a prisoner of the Gurkish.’

‘Yes.’

‘The one they tortured. I remember . . . you were brought to me.’

‘Yes.’

Farrad swallowed. As though the memory alone is enough to make him vomit. He glanced up at Frost and the pink eyes glowered back, unblinking. He glanced round the grubby, bloodstained room, at the cracked tiles, at the scarred table-top. His eyes lingered on the paper of confession lying upon it. ‘After what they did to you – how can you do this, now?’

Glokta showed Farrad his toothless grin. ‘After what they did to me, how could I do anything else?’

‘Why am I here?’

‘For the same reason as everyone else who comes here.’ Glokta watched Frost plant the heavy tips of his fingers on the paper of confession and slide it deliberately across the table towards the prisoner. ‘To confess.’

‘Confess to what?’

‘Why, to spying for the Gurkish.’

Farrad’s face creased up with disbelief. ‘I am no spy! The Gurkish took everything from me! I fled my home when they came! I am innocent, you must know this!’

Of course. As have been all the spies who confessed in this room over the last few days. But they all confessed, without exception. ‘Will you sign the paper?’

‘I have nothing to confess to!’

‘Why is it that no one can answer the questions I ask?’ Glokta stretched out his aching back, worked his creaking neck from side to side, rubbed at the bridge of his nose with finger and thumb. Nothing helped. But then nothing ever does. Why must they always make it so very difficult, for me and for themselves? ‘Practical Frost, would you show the good master our work so far?’

The albino slid a dented tin bucket out from under the table and dumped the contents without ceremony in front of the prisoner. Teeth clattered, and slid, and spun across the wood. Hundreds of them. Teeth of all shapes and sizes, from white, through all the shades of yellow, to brown. Teeth with bloody roots and with shreds of flesh attached. A couple tumbled from the far end of the table and bounced from the grimy tiles, clicked away into the corners of the narrow room.

Farrad gaped down in horror at the bloody mess of dentistry before him. And even the very Prince of Teeth can never have seen such a thing. Glokta leaned forwards. ‘I daresay you’ve pulled a tooth or two before yourself.’ The prisoner nodded dumbly. ‘Then you can probably imagine how tired I am after this lot. That’s why I’d really like to be done with you as quickly as possible. I don’t want you here, and you certainly don’t want to be here. We can help each other.’

‘What must I do?’ muttered Farrad, his tongue moving nervously around his own mouth.

‘It is not complicated. First you sign your confession.’

‘Thorry,’ mumbled Frost, leaning forward and brushing a couple of teeth off the document, one of them leaving a long, pink streak across the paper.

‘Then you name two others.’

‘Two other what?’

‘Why, two other spies for the Gurkish, of course, from among your people.’

‘But . . . I know no spies!’

‘Then some other names will have to serve. You have been named already, several times.’

The dentist swallowed, then shook his head, and pushed the paper away. A brave man, and a righteous one. But bravery and righteousness are bad virtues to have in this room. ‘I will sign. But I will not name innocent men. God have mercy on me, I will not.’

‘God might have mercy on you. But he doesn’t hold the pliers down here. Clamp him.’

Frost gripped Farrad’s head from behind with one great white hand, tendons standing from the pale skin as he forced his mouth open. Then he shoved the clamp between Farrad’s jaws and spun the nut round nimbly between finger and thumb until they were held wide open.

‘Ah!’ gurgled the dentist. ‘Ayrh!’

‘I know. And we’re just getting started.’ Glokta pushed back the lid of his case, watched the polished wood, the sharpened steel, the shining glass spread outwards. What the . . . There was a disconcerting gap in the tools. ‘For pity’s sake! Have you had the pliers out of here, Frost?’

‘Nuh,’ grunted the albino, shaking his head angrily.

‘Damn it! Can none of these bastards keep their own instruments? Go next door and see if we can borrow some, at least.’

The Practical lumbered from the room, the heavy door hanging ajar behind him. Glokta winced as he rubbed at his leg. Farrad stared at him, spit running from one corner of his forced-open mouth. His bulging eyes rolled sideways as a howl of pain came muffled from the corridor outside.

‘I do apologise for this,’ said Glokta. ‘We’re usually a great deal more organised, but it’s been busy as hell here the last few days. Such a lot to get through, you see.’

Frost pulled the door shut and handed Glokta a pair of rusty pliers, handles first. There was some dry blood and a couple of curly hairs caked to the jaws.

‘Is this the best they could do? These are dirty!’

Frost shrugged. ‘Whath a ifferenth?’

A fair point, I suppose. Glokta gave a long sigh, struggled up from his chair and leaned forwards to peer into Farrad’s mouth. And a sweet set he has, too. A pearly white complement. I suppose you’d expect prize-winning teeth from a prize-winning dentist. Anything else would be a poor advertisement for his trade.

‘I applaud your cleanliness. It’s a rare privilege to question a man who appreciates the importance of washing the mouth out. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a better set of teeth.’ Glokta tapped at them happily with the pliers. ‘It seems a shame to tear them all out, just so that you can confess in ten minutes time instead of now, but there we are.’ He closed the jaws around the nearest tooth, worked his hand around the handles.

‘Gurlgh,’ gurgled Farrad. ‘Glaigh!’

Glokta pursed his lips, as though considering, then released the pliers. ‘Let us give the good master one further chance to talk.’ Frost unscrewed the clamp and pulled it from Farrad’s mouth along with a string of drool. ‘Is there something you wish to say?’

‘I will sign!’ gasped Farrad, a long tear running down one cheek. ‘God help me, I will sign!’

‘And you will name two accomplices?’

‘Whatever you wish . . . please . . . whatever you wish.’

‘Excellent,’ said Glokta, as he watched the pen scratching against the paper of confession. ‘Who’s next?’

Glokta heard the lock behind him rattle. He scowled as he turned his head, preparing to scream at his presumptuous visitor.

‘Your Eminence,’ he whispered, with barely concealed dismay, grimacing as he struggled to get up from his chair.

‘No need to rise, I do not have all day.’ Glokta found himself frozen in the most painful possible position, bent somewhere between sitting and standing, and had to sag back into his chair with little grace as Sult swept into the room, three of his huge Practicals looming silently in the doorway behind him. ‘You may ask your freak of nature to leave us.’

Frost’s eyes narrowed, flickered over the other Practicals, then back to Sult. ‘Very good, Practical Frost,’ said Glokta hastily. ‘You may remove our prisoner.’

The albino unlocked Farrad’s manacles and dragged the dentist from his chair with one white fist, hauled him gasping by his collar to the door at the back of the room and ripped back the bolt with his free hand. He gave one pink glare over his shoulder and Sult glared back. Then he slammed the door behind him.

His Eminence slid into the chair opposite Glokta. No doubt still warm from the sweating arse of the brave and righteous Master Farrad. He brushed some of the teeth from the table-top before him with the side of one gloved hand and sent them clicking onto the floor. And he could not have seemed to care less had they been breadcrumbs. ‘There is a deadly conspiracy afoot within the Agriont. Have we made progress in unmasking it?’

‘I have interviewed most of the Kantic prisoners, extracted a suitable number of confessions, there should not be—’

Sult gave an angry wave of his hand. ‘Not that, halfwit. I refer to that bastard Marovia and his pawns, the so-called First of the Magi and our so-called King.’

Even now, with the Gurkish knocking at the gates? ‘Your Eminence, I had assumed the war would take precedence—’

‘You have not the wit to assume,’ sneered Sult. ‘What evidence have you collected against Bayaz?’

I stumbled upon something I shouldn’t have at the University, then was almost drowned in my bath. ‘So far . . . nothing.’

‘What of the parentage of King Jezal the First?’

‘That avenue too appears . . . a dead end.’ Or an avenue with my own death at the end, if my owners at Valint and Balk were to hear of it. And they hear of everything.

The Arch Lector’s lips twisted. ‘Then what the hell have you been doing lately?’

For the last three days I have been busy tearing meaningless confessions from the mouths of innocent men, so that we could appear effective. When was I supposed to find time to bring down the state, precisely? ‘I have been occupied with seeking Gurkish spies—’

‘Why do I never get anything from you but excuses? I have begun to wonder, since your effectiveness has so sharply declined, how you were able to keep Dagoska out of Gurkish hands so long. You must have needed a tremendous sum of money to strengthen the city’s defences.’

It took all of Glokta’s self-control to prevent his eye from twitching straight out of his head. Still, now, you twitching jelly, or we are done. ‘The Guild of Spicers were persuaded to contribute when their own livelihoods were on the line.’

‘How uncharacteristically generous of them. Now that I think of it, I find the whole business of Dagoska has a strange flavour. It has always struck me as odd that you chose to dispose of Magister Eider so privately, rather than sending her back to me.’

From very bad to an awful lot worse. ‘A miscalculation on my part, your Eminence. I thought that I would spare you the trouble of—’

‘Disposing of traitors is no trouble for me. You know that.’ Angry creases spread out around Sult’s hard blue eyes. ‘Could it be, after all we have been through together, you might take me for a fool?’

Glokta’s voice rasped uncomfortably in his dry throat. ‘Absolutely not, Arch Lector.’ Merely a lethal megalomaniac. He knows. He knows that I am not entirely the dutiful slave. But how much does he know? And from whom did he learn it?

‘I gave you an impossible task, and so I have allowed you the benefit of the doubt. But your benefit will only last as long as your successes. I grow tired of putting the spur to you. If you do not solve my problems with our new King in the next two weeks, I will have Superior Goyle dig out the answers to my questions about Dagoska. I will have him dig them from your twisted flesh, if I must. Do I make myself clear?’

‘I understand, Arch Lector.’

‘Then why ever are you still sitting here?’

‘You sound almost pleased to see me.’ A rare response indeed to my arrival.

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ She stepped graciously aside to allow him past. ‘How many girls are lucky enough to have a torturer for a chaperone? There’s nothing like it for encouraging the suitors.’

He hobbled over the threshold. ‘Where is your maid?’

‘She got herself all worked up about some Gurkish army or other, so I let her go. Went to her mother in Martenhorm.’

‘And you are yourself ready to leave, I hope?’ He followed her into the warm living room, shutters and curtains closed, illuminated by the shifting glow from the coals on the fire.

‘In fact, I have decided to stay in the city.’

‘Really? The tragic princess, pining in her empty castle? Abandoned by her faithless servants, wringing her helpless hands while her enemies surround the moat?’ Glokta snorted. ‘Are you sure you fit the role?’

‘Better than you fit that of the knight on the white charger, come to rescue the damsel with blade a-flashing.’ She looked him scornfully up and down. ‘I’d hoped for a hero with at least half his teeth.’

‘I thought you’d be used to getting less than you hoped for by now.’ I know that I am.

‘What can I say? I’m a romantic. Have you come here only to puncture my dreams?’

‘No. I do that without trying. I had in mind a drink and a conversation which did not include the subtext of my mutilated corpse.’

‘It is hard to say at this stage what direction our conversation might take, but the drink I can promise you.’ She poured him a glass and he tossed it back in four long swallows. He held it out again, sucking his sweet gums.

‘In all seriousness, the Gurkish are no more than a week from taking Adua under siege. You should leave as soon as possible.’

She filled his glass again, and then her own. ‘Haven’t you noticed that half the city has had the same idea? Such flea-bitten nags not requisitioned by the army are changing hands at five hundred marks a piece. Nervous citizens are pouring out to every corner of Midderland. Columns of defenceless refugees, wandering through a mass of mud at a mile a day as the weather turns cold, laden down with everything of value they possess, easy prey for every brigand within a hundred miles.’

‘True,’ Glokta had to admit as he wriggled his painful way into a chair near the fire.

‘And where would I go to anyway? I swear I have not a single friend or relative anywhere in Midderland. Would you have me hide in the woods, lighting fires by rubbing sticks together and hunting down squirrels with my bare hands? How the hell would I stay drunk in those circumstances? No, thank you, I will be safer here, and considerably more comfortable. I have coal for the fire and the cellar is full to capacity. I can hold out for months.’ She waved a floppy hand towards the wall. ‘The Gurkish are coming from the west, and we are on the eastern side of town. I could not be safer in the palace itself, I daresay.’

Perhaps she is right. Here, at least, I can keep some kind of watch over her. ‘Very well, I bow to your reasoning. Or I would, if my back allowed it.’

She settled herself opposite. ‘And how is life in the corridors of power?’

‘Chilly. As corridors often are.’ Glokta stroked his lips with a finger. ‘I find myself in a difficult situation.’

‘I have some experience with those.’

‘This one is . . . complicated.’

‘Well then, in terms a dull wench like me might understand.’

Where’s the harm? I stare death in the face already. ‘In the terms of a dull wench, then, imagine this . . . desperately needing certain favours, you have promised your hand in marriage to two very rich and powerful men.’

‘Huh. One would be a fine thing.’

‘None would be a fine thing, in this particular case. They are both old and of surpassing ugliness.’

She shrugged. ‘Ugliness is easily forgiven in the rich and powerful.’

‘But both these suitors are prone to violent displays of jealousy. Dangerous displays, if your wanton faithlessness were to become common knowledge. You had hoped to extricate yourself from one promise or the other at some stage, but now the date of the weddings draws near, and you find that you are . . . still considerably entangled with both. More so than ever, in fact. Your response?’

She pursed her lips and took a long breath, considering it, then tossed a strand of hair theatrically over her shoulder. ‘I would drive them both near madness with my matchless wit and smouldering beauty, then engineer a duel between the two. Whichever won would be rewarded with the ultimate prize of my hand in marriage, never suspecting I was once promised also to his rival. Since he is old, I would earnestly hope for his imminent death, leaving me a wealthy and respected widow.’ She grinned at him down her nose. ‘What say you to that, sir?’

Glokta blinked. ‘I fear the metaphor has lost its relevance.’

‘Or . . .’ Ardee squinted at the ceiling, then snapped her fingers. ‘I might use my subtle feminine wiles . . .’ thrusting back her shoulders and hitching up her bust, ‘to entrap a third man, still more powerful and wealthy. Young, and handsome, and smooth of limb as well, I suppose, since this is a metaphor. I would marry him and with his help destroy those other two, and abandon them penniless and disappointed. Ha! What think you?’

Glokta felt his eyelid twitching, and he pressed one hand against it. Interesting. ‘A third suitor,’ he murmured. ‘The idea had never even occurred.’