“No sign of revolution,” murmured Vick.
“No,” said Pike. “You sound… almost disappointed.”
She looked sharply sideways. His Eminence stared straight back at her, eyes bright in his burned mask of a face. No way to tell what he was thinking. There never was. But she saw the danger hidden in the observation. Like a cake full of nails.
“No one’s fought harder to stop the Breakers than I have,” she said.
“I am well aware! You scotched their schemes in Adua with impressive ruthlessness. And we could not have dealt so smoothly with the uprising here without your efforts. Nobody doubts your loyalty.”
“Good,” said Vick. She had become acutely aware how many Practicals were surrounding her.
“To Arch Lector Glokta.” And she felt the hairs stand on the back of her neck. “He was the one who helped you escape the camps, after all. Who gave you a new life. Who moulded you into such a formidable spy. But Glokta is gone.” Pike gave the sigh of a mourner at a funeral, if not the tears. “And your loyalty to me is quite another question. I, after all, have done nothing to earn it. To count upon it so lightly would be awfully presumptuous.”
“The Breakers are traitors,” said Vick. Stick to the official line. He could only judge her on what she said, not what she thought. “Enemies of the king. There’s nothing to sympathise with.”
“Nothing?” They rode beneath the towering crane at the edge of a deserted building site, Pike’s eyes hidden in the sudden darkness of its shadow. “Do you really think so? Can you really think so? A good soldier fights in a world of black and white. He must make monsters of his enemies. The devious Southerner, the degenerate Styrian, the barbaric Northman, the treacherous Breaker. But a good spy must swim in an ocean of grey, swept by unpredictable currents, far out of sight of land. Those of us who walk, talk, sleep with the enemy, well—we see that they are people. We hear their motives, their hopes, their justifications. Despite your efforts to prove the contrary, you are not made of stone, Inquisitor. None of us are. Proud men like Sibalt. Noble men like Malmer. How could you not sympathise? Given where you come from?”
“Adua?” Vick kept her face neutral, but behind the mask her mind was racing. Was he trying to trap her? Say she had no sympathy with the Breakers, and he’d call her a liar. Say she had sympathy, he’d call her a traitor.
“I meant the prison camps of Angland. I have come to believe… that the heart of a society… is revealed in its prisons.” Pike rocked gently with the movement of his horse, eyes fixed up the empty street ahead. “I was not there nearly as long as you, but long enough to lose my face. Honestly, I was never a handsome man. I daresay I turn more heads now. Your scars may not show quite so clearly, but I never doubt you have them. So I believe I understand you.”
“Really?” In spite of all her efforts, her voice sounded strangled.
“Oh, yes. I believe I understand you better than you understand yourself.”
It worried her that Pike was suddenly so talkative. It made her think that he was working his way to something, and she would not like it at all when they got there. She had the feeling, yet again, that this was one of those moments when her life hung by a thread. But when she faced Sibalt, Risinau, Vitari, Savine dan Brock, she had gone in with her eyes open, had known the line she must walk. What Pike wanted was a mystery.
“It was Colonel West who pulled me from the camps,” he mused, “without the slightest idea that we had known each other years before. In his company I even held a shield in a duel, if you can believe that. When the Bloody-Nine beat the Feared and made himself King of the Northmen! Life is… such a cobweb of coincidences, isn’t it? West was a man one could admire.” He gave a sorry sigh. “But the truly good men never seem to last. He died, and I began to work with Arch Lector Glokta. Even though I knew he was far from a good man. Even though he was the very man who had sent me to the camps in the first place. Does any of this sound familiar?”
It did. Not the part about holding a shield in a duel, but otherwise quite uncomfortably so.
Pike watched a nervous-looking set of labourers clear out of their way to huddle against the houses as they clattered past. “In the name of justice, I tortured dissenters in Adua. In the name of freedom, I imprisoned rebels in Starikland. In the name of order, I spread chaos across the Far Country. I was as loyal a servant as the Crown ever had.”
Vick couldn’t help but frown at that choice of words. “Was?”
“Then the manufactories started to spring up, and the unrest began among the spinners, and I was sent here, to Valbeck, as Superior of the Inquisition.”
“You were Superior of Valbeck?”
Pike had that little curl at the corner of his mouth which was the closest he came to a smile. “You didn’t know?”
The street opened out and they rode into the square that should’ve been Valbeck’s busy heart. It was deserted now, except for well-armed guards posted at the corners and clustered on the steps of the courthouse where Judge had tossed out death sentences. Men with fine new breastplates, fine new halberds, fine new swords, everything twinkling in the autumn sun.
A double row of them was drawn up in front of the rebuilt Valbeck branch of Valint and Balk, a temple to debt more magnificent than ever, scaffolding clinging to its pillared façade so sculptors could finish a frieze of history’s richest merchants upon its giant pediment.
“Who are these?” muttered Vick. Some private militia, hired to keep the peace with the king’s soldiers gone? But something didn’t fit. Rough-looking men, all standing their own way. Clean armour, maybe, but unshaven faces.
Pike didn’t look concerned. You might almost have called him jaunty as he led them across the empty square at a trot, past the vacant pedestals of statues torn down during the uprising to the bank’s front steps. That double row of armed men parted and two figures came from the midst. Two awfully familiar figures. One was a fat man in a well-cut suit, the other a tall, lean woman in a dress stitched from many-coloured rags, a rust-eaten breastplate over the top, her red hair pinned into a bonfire tangle.
“Fuck,” breathed Vick. Not often she was at a loss for words, but right then she had nothing better.
“Victarine dan Teufel!” called Risinau, the light of pious belief burning as brightly in his eyes as ever.
“Unless I’m much mistook,” sneered Judge, the light of angry madness burning even brighter in hers, “which I’m not often.”
First thing Vick thought was that they’d fallen into a trap. Then Pike spread his arms wide. “My friends!” he called as he swung down from his saddle to meet them. “My children!” And he kissed Risinau on the forehead, and did the same to Judge, all smiling as if this was a family reunion long put off, while the armed men thumped the butts of their halberds against the steps and sent up an approving rattle.
Like every puzzle, once Vick knew the answer, she couldn’t understand how she hadn’t seen it right away. She was the one who’d fallen into the trap. She alone.
“You’re the Weaver,” she said.
“A name I have used, at times.” Pike gestured to the soot-stained old buildings around the square, the new chimneys looming beyond their roofs. “So much has changed since I was the Superior here. The rich have grown ever richer, but the poor… well. You have seen it. You have lived it. If the heart of a nation is revealed in its prisons, then you and I have seen the heart of the Union, and we know that it is rotten. I knew when I was in the camps, that rot had to be burned away. But it was not until I came to Valbeck that I began to dream…” And he closed his eyes, and took a long breath through his nose. “That I would be the one to do it.”