The Blade Itself

away.
    â€œGood
evening,â€

Fencing Practice
    â€œPress
him, Jezal, press him! Don’t be shy!â€

The Morning Ritual
    It was a bright
summers day, and the park was filled to capacity with colourful
revellers. Colonel Glokta strode manfully toward some meeting of
great importance, people bowing and scraping respectfully away to
give him room. He ignored most, favoured the more important ones with
his brilliant smile. The lucky few beamed back at him, delighted to
be noticed.
    â€œI suppose
we all serve the King in our own way,â€

First of the Magi
    The lake
stretched away, fringed by steep rocks and dripping greenery, surface
pricked by the rain, flat and grey as far as the eye could see.
Logen’s eye couldn’t see too far in this weather, it had
to be said. The opposite shore could have been a hundred strides
away, but the calm waters looked deep. Very deep.
    Logen had long
ago given up any attempt at staying dry, and the water ran through
his hair and down his face, dripped from his nose, his fingers, his
chin. Being wet, tired, and hungry had become a part of life. It
often had been, come to think on it. He closed his eyes and felt the
rain patter against his skin, heard the water lapping on the shingle.
He knelt by the lake, pulled the stopper from his flask and pushed it
under the surface, watched the bubbles break as it filled up.
    Malacus Quai
stumbled out of the bushes, breathing fast and shallow. He sank down
to his knees, crawled against the roots of a tree, coughed out phlegm
onto the pebbles. His coughing sounded bad now. It came right up from
his guts and made his whole rib cage rattle. He was even paler than
he had been when they first met, and a lot thinner. Logen was
somewhat thinner too. These were lean times, all in all. He walked
over to the haggard apprentice and squatted down.
    â€œJust give
me a moment.â€

The Good Man
    It was a hot,
hot day outside, and the sun shone brightly through the many-paned
windows, casting criss-cross patterns on the wooden floor of the
audience chamber. It was mid-afternoon, and the room was soupy warm
and stuffy as a kitchen.
    Fortis dan Hoff,
the Lord Chamberlain, was red-faced and sweaty in his fur-trimmed
robes of state, and had been in an increasingly filthy mood all
afternoon. Harlen Morrow, his Under-Secretary for Audiences, looked
even more uncomfortable, but then he had his terror of Hoff to
contend with, in addition to the heat. Both men seemed greatly
distressed in their own ways, but at least they got to sit down.
    Major West was
sweating steadily into his embroidered dress uniform. He had been
standing in the same position, hands behind his back, teeth gritted,
for nearly two hours while Lord Hoff sulked and grumbled and bellowed
his way through the applicants and anyone else in view. West
fervently wished, and not for the first time that afternoon, that he
was lying under a tree in the park, with a strong drink. Or perhaps
under a glacier, entombed within the ice. Anywhere but here.
    Standing guard
on these horrible audiences was hardly one of West’s more
pleasant duties, but it could have been worse. You had to spare a
thought for the eight soldiers stood around the walls: they were in
full armour. West was waiting for one of them to pass out and crash
to the floor with a sound like a cupboard full of saucepans, no doubt
to the great disgust of the Lord Chamberlain, but so far they were
all somehow staying upright.
    â€œWhy is
this damned room always the wrong temperature?â€

On the List
    Why do I do
this?
    The outline of
Villem dan Robb’s townhouse was cut out in black against the
clear night sky. It was an unremarkable building, a
two-storey-dwelling with a low wall and a gate in front, just like a
hundred others in this street. Our old friend Rews used to live in
a palatial great villa near the market. Robb really should have asked
him for some more ambitious bribes. Still. Lucky for us he didn’t. Elsewhere in the city the fashionable avenues would be brightly lit
and busy with drunken revellers right through until dawn. But this
secluded side street was far from the bright lights and the prying
eyes.
    We can work
undisturbed.
    Round the side
of the building, on the upper floor, a lamp was burning in a narrow
window. Good. Our friend is at home. But still awake—we must
tread gently. He turned to Practical Frost and pointed down the
side of the house. The albino nodded and