Before They Are Hanged

She swallowed. “He’ll be alive?”

“Possibly. Hard to say. Depends whether the executioners do their job properly. Anyway, he won’t live long.” Not without his guts.

“Seems… extreme.”

“It is meant to be. It was the most savage punishment our savage forebears could dream up. Reserved for those who attempt harm to the royal person. Not carried out, I understand, for some eighty years.”

“Hence the crowd.”

Glokta shrugged. “It’s a curiosity, but you always get a good showing for an execution. People love to see death. It reminds them that however mean, however low, however horrible their lives become… at least they have one.”

Glokta felt a tap on his shoulder and looked round, with some pain, to see Severard’s masked face hovering just behind him. “I dealt with that thing. That thing about Vitari.”

“Huh. And?”

Severard’s eyes slid suspiciously sideways to Ardee, then he leaned forward to whisper in Glokta’s ear. “I followed her to a house, down below Gait’s Green, near the market there.”

“I know it. And?”

“I took a peek in through a window.”

Glokta raised an eyebrow. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you? What was in there?”

“Children.”

“Children?” muttered Glokta.

“Three little children. Two girls and a boy. And what colour do you suppose their hair was?”

You don’t say. “Not flaming red, by any chance?”

“Just like their mother.”

“She’s got children?” Glokta licked thoughtfully at his gums. “Who’d have thought it?”

“I know. I thought that bitch had a block of ice for a cunt.”

That explains why she was so keen to get back from the South. All that time, she had three little ones waiting. The mothering instinct. How terribly touching. He wiped some wet from beneath his stinging left eye. “Well done, Severard, this could be useful. What about that other thing? The Prince’s guard?”

Severard lifted his mask for a moment and scratched underneath it, eyes darting nervously around. “That’s a strange one. I tried but… it seems he’s gone missing.”

“Missing?”

“I spoke to his family. They haven’t seen him since the day before the Prince died.”

Glokta frowned. “The day before?” But he was there… I saw him. “Get Frost, and Vitari too. Get me a list of everyone who was in the palace that night. Every lord, every servant, every soldier. I am getting to the truth of this.” One way or another.

“Did Sult tell you to?”

Glokta looked round sharply. “He didn’t tell me not to. Just get it done.”

Severard muttered something, but his words were lost as the noise of the crowd suddenly swelled in a wave of angry jeering. Tulkis was being led out onto the scaffold. He shuffled forwards, chains rattling round his ankles. He did not cry or wail, nor did he yell in defiance. He simply looked drawn, and sad, and in some pain. There were light bruises round his face, tracks of angry red spots down his arms and legs, across his chest. Impossible to use hot needles without leaving some marks, but he looks well, considering. He was naked aside from a cloth tied round his waist. To spare the delicate sensibilities of the ladies present. Watching a man’s entrails spilling out is excellent entertainment, but the sight of his cock, well, that would be obscene.

A clerk stepped to the front of the scaffold and started reading out the prisoner’s name, the nature of the charge, the terms of his confession and his punishment, but even at this distance he could hardly be heard for the sullen muttering of the crowd, punctuated by an occasional furious scream. Glokta grimaced and worked his leg slowly back and forth, trying to loosen the cramping muscles.

The masked executioners stepped forward and took hold of the prisoner, moving with careful skill. They pulled a black bag over the envoy’s head, snapped manacles shut around his neck, his wrists, his ankles. Glokta could see the canvas moving in and out in front of his mouth. The desperate last breaths. Does he pray, now? Does he curse and rage? Who can know, and what difference can it make?

They hoisted him up into the air, spreadeagled on the frame. Most of his weight was on his arms. Enough on the collar round his neck to choke him, not quite enough to kill. He struggled somewhat, of course. Entirely natural. An animal instinct to climb, to writhe, to wriggle out and breathe free. An instinct that cannot be resisted. One of the executioners went to the rack, pulled out a heavy blade, displayed it to the crowd with a flourish, the thin sun flashing briefly on its edge. He turned his back on the audience, and began to cut.

The crowd went silent. Almost deathly still, aside from the odd hushed whisper. It was a punishment that brooked no calling out. A punishment which demanded awestruck silence. A punishment to which there could be no response other than a horrified, fascinated staring. That is its design. So there was only silence, and perhaps the wet gurgling of the prisoner’s breath. Since the collar makes screaming impossible.

“A fitting punishment, I suppose,” whispered Ardee as she watched the envoy’s bloody gut slithering out of his body, “for the murderer of the Crown Prince.”

Glokta bowed his head to whisper in her ear. “I’m reasonably sure that he did not kill anyone. I suspect he is guilty of nothing more than being a courageous man, who came to us speaking truth and holding out the hand of peace.”

Her eyes widened. “Then why hang him?”

“Because the Crown Prince has been murdered. Someone has to hang.”

“But… who really killed Raynault?”

“Someone who wants no peace between Gurkhul and the Union. Someone who wants the war between us to grow, and spread, and never end.”

“Who could want that?”

Glokta said nothing. Who indeed?

You don’t have to admire that Fallow character, but he can certainly pick a good chair. Glokta settled back into the soft upholstery with a sigh, stretching his feet out towards the fire, working his aching ankles round and round in clicking circles.

Ardee did not seem quite so comfortable. But then this morning’s diversion was hardly a comforting spectacle. She stood frowning out of the window, thoughtful, one hand pulling nervously at a strand of hair. “I need a drink.” She went to the cabinet and opened it, took out a bottle and a glass. She paused, and looked round. “Aren’t you going to tell me it’s a little early in the day?”

Glokta shrugged. “You know what the time is.”

“I need something, after that…”

“Then have something. You don’t need to explain yourself to me. I’m not your brother.”

She jerked her head round and gave him a hard look, opened her mouth as though about to speak, then she shoved the bottle angrily away and the glass after it, snapped the doors of the cabinet shut. “Happy?”

He shrugged. “About as close as I get, since you ask.”

Ardee dumped herself into a chair opposite, staring sourly down at one shoe. “What happens now?”

“Now? Now we will delight each other with humorous observations for a lazy hour, then a stroll into town?” He winced. “Slowly, of course. Then a late lunch, perhaps, I was thinking of—”

“I meant about the succession.”

“Oh,” muttered Glokta. “That.” He reached round and dragged a cushion into a better position, then stretched out further with a satisfied grunt. One could almost pretend, sitting in this warm and comfortable room, in such attractive and agreeable company, that one still had some kind of life. He nearly had a smile on his face as he continued. “There will be a vote in Open Council. Meaning, I have no doubt,