The Wisdom of Crowds Read online

  And none are more fanatical in their faith than the convert. Sworbreck strutted across the tiled floor until he stood before the weeping Styrian. “And you!” he screeched. “You were the mastermind!”

  The woman stared, her lip wobbling, her bloody hand clapped to the coin wound. Rarely had Orso seen anyone look less like the mastermind of anything. The pink point of her tongue darted over her pale lips, breath coming fast. Blind panic, and who could blame her? Orso felt his shoulders sag. Everyone in the court knew what came next.

  “I denounce them!” she wailed, desperately. “I didn’t know what they were doing! They’re guilty! They’re all guilty!”

  “I knew it!” shouted Sworbreck, delighted.

  “I never met her!” screeched the baker.

  “Lies!” said the miller. “Lies.”

  The banker pulled off his lenses with a trembling hand and put the other over his eyes.

  “Guilty!” shouted Judge, banging dents in the High Table with the smith’s hammer she used as a gavel. “Guilty, guilty, fucking guilty!”

  There was no need to pronounce a sentence. The only outcomes here were acquittal or the Tower of Chains. Hildi stared at Judge, and Broad, and Sarlby, and the red-smeared Burners jeering from the public gallery. “They’re monsters,” Orso heard her whisper.

  “I almost wish they were,” he muttered. “That would be easier. But they’re just people.”

  “They’re the worst people I ever saw.”

  “Of course they are. We hanged all the best ones. The ones who might have helped, might have compromised, might have built bridges, we left dangling over the road to Valbeck. Of course they are cruel, and greedy, and brutal. Those are the lessons we taught. That was the example we set.”

  “I never met them!” the Styrian woman burbled as the prisoners were manhandled up the aisle. “I’m innocent!” But it was far too late for that. It was too late the moment they were put in the dock. There was only one real conspiracy here. To find people to blame, and they were all complicit.

  Judge tossed down her hammer and sat back, picking her teeth. “What’s for lunch?” she asked.

  Worse Than Murder

  “Damn,” whispered Tallow, steam puffing about his face, “it’s cold.” And he wrapped his thin arms tight around his thin ribs, and worked his chin into his scarf.

  Vick’s brother used to do the selfsame thing, in the camps. Bundled up in every scrap of cloth they had, huddled together for warmth under a blanket she’d got a bloody nose stealing. Gave her a sudden urge to hug Tallow, rub his back, clamp her gloved hands over the red tips of his ears.

  But Sibalt was the last man she hugged, and he ended up slitting his own throat. So she hawked up cold snot and sent it spinning into the frozen dirt beside the cart instead.

  “Why do you never have enough clothes?”

  “No one’s got enough clothes now.”

  “Scarf on a Constable. Not exactly fearsome, is it?”

  “More fearsome than froze to death, I daresay.”

  Vick conceded that with a smoky grunt. He’d hardly be the first one froze to death, they were finding them every morning. In alleyways. In doorways. In cellars. Frost in their eyebrows. Ground was frozen too hard to bury the poor bastards.

  “Don’t you ever get cold?” he asked.

  Vick got cold. Her throat had been sore for days, her nostrils raw from the running and wiping, running and wiping. But she knew better than to let the pain show. Letting it show is the same as asking for more. “Got colder than this, in the camps. Look on the sunny side.” And she snorted up more snot. “If it was warmer we’d have a plague.”

  “Sounds like you got the plague anyway,” muttered Tallow.

  “If you’re concerned about infection you could always join the Burners.” And she nodded down the street towards them.

  They’d built a great bonfire. Images of royalty. Symbols of the past. Portraits of King Orso, King Jezal and the many crowned arseholes that had preceded them. Furniture carved with the blazing sun of the Union. Curtains embroidered with the devices of great families. Cutlery stamped with patriotic mottos. Flags. Uniforms. Wigs. Fans. Anything that could be considered aristocratic. A Burner stomped from a house and flung a full set of crockery splintering into the blaze. Folk gathered dangerously close, eager hands out to the flames, light playing on pinched-in faces.

  Tallow huddled even deeper into his scarf. “I reckon I’ll stay here.”

  “Lucky me,” said Vick. Though if she was honest for once she was glad of the company. A sad indictment of the life she’d chosen. The one person she trusted was the one she’d blackmailed into betraying his friends.

  Pike came striding from the cellar, pulling on his gloves. “Fine work, Chief Inspector Teufel,” he rasped as he watched the Constables file up the steps to dump armloads of papers into the cart, the odd one floating free to stick in the half-frozen mud. “A bank hidden in a wine-merchant’s cellars. We have driven them underground, like rats.”

  “A bank of a sort,” said Vick. “They loaned money to pimps and fences here in the slums, ran pawn shops and jerry shops, invested in gambling houses, husk houses, doss-houses, whorehouses.”

  “A criminals’ bank,” muttered Tallow.

  Pike narrowed his eyes. “All banks are criminal. The loans here may have been smaller, the interest higher, but the profits flowed into the same coffers. The same ledgers. The same bottomless well of greed. This cellar was a branch of the Banking House of Valint and Balk, as much as the grand building on the Four Corners.” The one in which that vast vault door was still frustrating every effort of locksmiths, engineers and Gurkish Fire.

  “The roots of these vile institutions have dug into every part of Union society.” Pike’s lip curled as he watched more paperwork flung into the cart. “A web of debts and corruption that stretches from the lowest to the highest. Their rot must be hacked away.” Two Constables had dragged a squealing clerk into the street. “Without doubt.” Sticks rose and fell, black against the fire. “Without hesitation.” A limp body was hauled away, head hanging. “Without mercy.”

  Pike’s war on the banks was starting to look fanatical, but there was no denying fanaticism was in fashion. “What about everything else?” asked Vick.

  The Commissioner turned, his breath a smoking cloud about his high collar. “What about everything else?”

  “No riots lately, I’ll admit—”

  “Too cold for it,” Tallow whispered, trying to cup the warmth of his breath in his pale fingers.

  “But robbery, burglary, violence, just as bad as when Risinau was Chairman.”

  “Worse,” muttered Tallow, “if anything.”

  “Lot of homeless on the streets. Lot of desperate people. They’re coming in from all over. Looking for work, when there’s less work than ever. Mills closing. Manufactories shuttered. No coal. No food.” Vick licked her sore lips as she watched the shackled employees of Valint and Balk hauled from their cellar. “No money.”

  “We must focus on the grand crimes. Let the Burners worry about the petty ones.”

  Vick winced down the street towards the bonfire. They weren’t burning people on it, as far as she could tell, but only because Judge wanted the proper show of pushing them off the Tower of Chains later.

  She should’ve kept her mouth shut. She always kept her mouth shut.

  But somehow it was getting harder and harder to keep her mouth

  shut. “With respect, Commissioner, the Burners are as likely to punish the innocent as the guilty.”

  Pike hardly seemed to hear her. “The banks remain our focus. Usury is the worst of crimes.”

  “Worse than murder?”

  “Murder leaves one Citizen dead. The banks infect us all with greed.” The flames down the street glimmered in the corners of Pike’s eyes. “Are we any closer to finding the manager of the Adua headquarters of Valint and Balk? I would very much like to see the inside of their vault.”

  �
��We’re closing in. Questioning the employees. But there are hundreds, and most only know their little splinter of the business. The bank owns property all across the city. No one would ever have believed how much.”

  “We will take it all back,” said Pike, “and give it to the people.”

  Vick glanced towards the fire. “What’ll they do with it?”

  “Sometimes, to change the world we must first—”

  “Burn it down,” she finished, softly. But it was sounding more and more like something a madman says to justify all the fires he loves to start. “If the manager’s in the city, we’ll find him.”

  Pike gave her a stiff nod. “Keep me informed.” And he strode away, a dozen Constables in tow, past someone standing in the shadows of a doorway on the far side of the street. A woman with a board propped against her hip, bright eyes darting over Pike and his retinue, towards the cellar and the cart, away to the firelit crowd.

  “Make sure this all gets to the House of Truth,” Vick grunted at Tallow.

  “We call it the House of Purity now, remember?”

  She was already walking over, slipping her hand into her pocket, finding the chilly angles of her brass knuckles. Best to approach everyone as if they were a threat, though this woman didn’t look too formidable. Her lips had a bluish tinge, nostrils pink at the rims, an old quilt around her shoulders with a hole cut for her head to go through.

  “Your name, Citizeness?”

  “Groom, Inspector. Carmee Groom.” She lowered the board. There was a sheet of paper clipped to it, a stub of charcoal in the blackened fingers of her other hand. “I’m an artist.”

  Vick relaxed a little. About as much as she ever did. “So I see.”

  “I am sketching. For a painting.”

  Vick frowned towards the bonfire, the ragged figures warming their hands, the Burners dragging people from the buildings, the Constables emptying out the cellar that had been a bank. “You want to paint this?”

  “Future generations might never believe that it happened.” She blew some yellow hair out of her face with a smoky breath and went back to sketching, charcoal hissing on paper. “Then it might happen again.”

  Lessons

  “There was a hell of a battle fought here,” said Shivers, pausing on the side of the hill to frown across the snow-covered valley, all silent in that brittle way only winter countryside can be.

  Isern gave a smoky snort. “You could say that of all the North. Is there a stride of sod, anywhere ’twixt the Crinna and the Whiteflow, hasn’t been watered with blood at one time or another?”

  “Not like it was here,” said Shivers. “Greatest battle the North ever saw. Black Dow had his standard on this very hill.” He pointed to the white fields below them on their right, slashed by black walls, studded with black trees. “Scale down there, still wi’ both hands, and Brodd Tenways, and Cairm Ironhead, Glama Golden, Caul Reachey over on the left, in Osrung.” As Rikke struggled up level with him he turned around and carried on climbing. “Every one of ’em back to the mud.”

  “Well,” said Isern, using her spear like a walking stick, “being a War Chief is a business heaped high with both risks and rewards.”

  “Lord Marshal Kroy stood on the other side,” said Shivers, “and thousands o’ Union soldiers, and your father, too. Three red days we had of it. Men struggled here with all they had for each step of ground. Died and killed for every handful of soil.” He frowned out at the crisp, quiet white, stretching away to the hazy fells all around, and shook his head like he couldn’t make it fit. “Now you’d never know. Few years passed and… it’s just fields.”

  “You’ve turned talkative,” said Rikke. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d said this much in one afternoon.

  “Brings it all back, I guess, being here.” Shivers stepped over the crest of the hill and onto its flat top, frowning towards the great ring of stones they called the Heroes, black against the white sky, like the prongs on a giant’s crown. “The good and the bad.”

  “No trouble planting your flag here now.” And Corleth stuck Rikke’s rolled-up standard of the Long-Eye into the snow, her face all blotched pink from the cold.

  One of the stones was broken halfway up, a couple more had toppled down the centuries, another sheared off and cloven by a crack, like it was dealt a blow with a mighty hammer. Rikke stepped over to the nearest and kicked the snow from her boots against its side. By the dead, it was a size. Four times a man’s height or more, topped with snow, streaked with wet, spattered with lichen, crusted with moss.

  “How did they get the bastard things up here?” Her face was pinched and her chest raw from the winter but her body all sticky-hot from the climb under her cloak, so she couldn’t decide whether to draw it tight or fling it off. “Just getting myself up here was a struggle.”

  “This is where Black Dow fought Calder.” Shivers was standing at the edge of the ring of stones, looking in at the snow-covered circle of tangled grass and thistle inside. “A duel to the death.”

  “Aye, and you cheated,” said Isern, “and dinged Black Dow in the back of the head with that sword you’re wearing, and so Calder became Black Calder, and stole the North, and gave Skarling’s Chair to his brother to sit in, who gave it to his nephew to sit in.” She stuck her bottom lip out and scratched at her throat. “Come to think of it, all this is your fault.”

  Shivers frowned down at the grey hilt of his sword, then over at Isern. “Calder seemed the better choice, then.”

  “And now?”

  “And now,” said Rikke, “there’s no unpicking the warp and weft of all the things said and done since that day. It’s not a right choice or a wrong, any more than wind blown or snow fallen.” And gingerly, as if she was laying her hand on a sleeping dog, she put her palm to one of the stones. Maybe she’d hoped for her Long Eye to pop open and show her hidden truths, but if there’d been high magic here it was long faded, or at any rate she hadn’t the key to unlock it. It was just a stone.

  Corleth pulled out a flask, took a little nip and offered it around. “Seems your friend’s not here yet.”

  “He’s no friend,” said Rikke, taking a nip of her own.

  “Then we can trot off ’fore he arrives,” said Isern. “You took Uffrith without his help, and you took Carleon without his help, and you’ve took half the North without his help, and now he slinks up, sniffing about like a badger at the henhouse. You don’t need his help getting your hands on the other half.”

  “Might need his help keeping the half I’ve got, the way things are going.”

  “’Twas your own cockiness set things going that way, d’you see. Did I not say cockiness was the grave you’d trip into if you didn’t mind your step?”

  “Only about a thousand times. Can’t hurt to hear the man out.”

  Isern turned her head, spat chagga juice and left a brown streak down her chin. “You’ll be telling me next it can’t hurt putting a crab down your trousers.”

  “Aye, well,” grunted Rikke, handing the flask to Shivers, “my trousers, my choice to make.”

  “No doubt, ’tis only that the choice you’re making is a very poor one, as most of your choices have been since your skinny arse touched Skarling’s Chair.”

  Rikke ground her teeth. “I could tire of your slighting references to my arse.”

  “And I could tire of your way of managing the North.”

  “Oh, you’ve made that very clear. I think what first gave it away is how you keep saying it, straight to my face, in front of anyone who’ll listen.”

  “A wise leader sups well upon the wisdom of their advisors.”

  “It’s a shame my advisors don’t have any, then, isn’t it?”

  “Oy,” said Shivers, lowering the flask. “I’ve a lifetime o’ defeats to draw on.” Rikke ignored him.

  “There was a time your lessons smacked of wisdom, Isern-i-Phail. Now they smack of mad witterings summoned on the spot. Or worse yet, the maddest bits picked out f
rom your father’s mad witterings, like a drunk squirrel picking nuts from a turd. I could do without the constant whittling down of my authority.”

  “One cannot much whittle what is hardly there,” snapped Isern. “First you shat yourself with the Nail, now you think Jonas Clover’s the jug to hold all our hopes?”

  “There are some tasks trustworthy men aren’t suited to,” growled Rikke. “You catch rabbits with weasels, not with bulls.”

  “That’s one weasel might end up down your trousers.”

  “What is this obsession with animals down my trousers?”

  “I don’t get it, either,” muttered Corleth.

  “You can shut your face, girl!” snarled Isern, rounding on her and shaking her spear in her face. “’Fore I give it a shutting from which it will not soon open.”

  “Don’t carp at her!” Rikke stepped between the two of them. “You’ve had it in for her from the start and all she’s tried to do is help. By the dead, your bloody carping! Have you ever heard of a woman with such a tongue for carping as this one, Corleth?”

  Corleth blinked at Isern, then at Rikke, and swallowed. “Honestly, I’d rather not get stuck between the two o’ you.”

  “There’s wisdom,” said Shivers, frowning at the worsening row.

  Rikke talked over him. “You’re too generous, Corleth! See how generous she is? You couldn’t carp any more if you were a carp.”

  Isern’s knuckles were white on the haft of her spear. “Saved you, didn’t I? In the woods? In the winter? Not bad for a fish.”

  “You did save me, and my ears are sore from being reminded, and my throat’s raw from thanking you for it. If I was planning to get lost in the woods again you’d be my first pick for a companion. But since I’m planning to sit in Skarling’s Chair, I’m beginning to doubt you’re fitted for the role.” She waved her hand towards Corleth. “There are folk with leveller heads and sweeter tempers one could have at one’s elbow.”