Before They Are Hanged Read Online Free PDF

followed the dark water, still the wind
blew cold through her clothes, still the looming sky was heavy with
chaos, and yet the country was changing. Where it had been flat as a
table, now it was full of rises and sudden, hidden troughs. Land that
men could hide in, and she did not like that thought. Not that she
was fearful, for Ferro Maljinn feared no man. But she had to look and
listen all the more carefully, for signs that anyone had passed, for
signs that anyone was waiting.
    That was simple
good sense.
    The grass had
changed as well. She had grown used to it all around, tall and waving
in the wind, but here it was short, and dry, and withered pale like
straw. It was getting shorter, too, as they went further. Today there
were bald patches scattered round. Bare earth, where nothing grew.
Empty earth, like the dust of the Badlands.
    Dead earth.
    And dead for no
reason that she could see. She frowned out across the crinkled plain,
out towards far distant hills, a faint and ragged line above the
horizon. Nothing moved in all that vast space. Nothing but them and
the impatient clouds. And one bird, hovering high, high up, almost
still on the air, long feathers on its dark wing tips fluttering.
    â€œFirst
bird I seen in two days,â€

A Matter of Time
    To
Arch Lector Sult,
    Head
of his Majesty’s Inquisition.
    Your
Eminence,
    Six
weeks now, we have held the Gurkish back. Each morning they brave our
murderous fire to tip earth and stone into our ditch, each night we
lower men from the walls to try and dig it out. In spite of all our
efforts, they have finally succeeded in filling the channel in two
places. Daily, now, scaling parties rush forward from the Gurkish
lines and set their ladders, sometimes making it onto the walls
themselves, only to be bloodily repulsed.
    Meanwhile
the bombardment by catapults continues, and several sections of the
walls are dangerously weakened. They have been shored up, but it
might not be long before the Gurkish have a practicable breach.
Barricades have been raised on the inside to contain them should they
make it through into the Lower City. Our defences are tested to the
limit, but no man entertains a thought of surrender. We will fight
on.
    As
always, your Eminence, I serve and obey.
    Sand
dan Glokta
    Superior
of Dagoska.
    Glokta held his
breath, licking at his gums as he watched the dust clouds settling
across the roofs of the slums through his eye-glass. The last crashes
and clatters of falling stones faded, and Dagoska, for that one
moment, was strangely silent. The world holds its breath.
    Then the distant
screaming reached him on his balcony, thrust out from the wall of the
Citadel, high above the city. A screaming he remembered well from
battlefields both old and new. And hardly happy memories. The
Gurkish war cry. The enemy are coming. Now, he knew, they were
charging across the open ground before the walls, as they had done so
many times these past weeks. But this time they have a breach.
    He watched the
tiny shapes of soldiers moving on the dust-coated walls and towers to
either side of the gap. He moved his eye-glass down to take in the
wide half-circle of barricades, the triple ranks of men squatting
behind them, waiting for the Gurkish to come. Glokta frowned and
worked his numb left foot inside his boot. A meagre-seeming
defence, indeed. But all we have.
    Now Gurkish
soldiers began to pour through the yawning breach like black ants
swarming from a nest; a crowd of jostling men, twinkling steel,
waving banners, emerging from the clouds of brown dust, scrambling
down the great heap of fallen masonry and straight into a furious
hail of flatbow bolts. First through the breach. An unenviable
position. The front ranks were mown down as they came on, tiny
shapes falling and tumbling down the hill of rubble behind the walls.
Many fell, but there were always more, pressing in over the bodies of
their comrades, struggling forward over the mass of broken stones and
shattered