Read Before They Are Hanged for Free Online

rock. Of sand and stone, empty of life. The sky
was a still white nothing, heavy as pale lead, promising rain but
never quite delivering. They rode clustered round the cart as though
huddling for warmth, the only warm things in a hundred miles of cold
desert, the only moving things in a place frozen in time, the only
living things in a dead country.
    The road was
wide, but the stones were cracked and buckled. In places whole
stretches of it had crumbled away, in others flows of mud had covered
it entirely. The dead stumps of trees jutted from the bare earth to
either side. Bayaz must have seen him looking at them.
    â€œAn avenue
of proud oaks lined this road for twenty miles from the city gates.
In summer their leaves shimmered and shook in the wind over the
plain. Juvens planted them with his own hands, in the Old Time, when
the Empire was young, long before even I was born.â€

Luck
    â€œUp you
get, Luthar.â€

Beneath the Ruins
    â€œYou
alive, pink?â€

No Good for Each Other
    Ferro waded on
against the current, up to her waist in fast-flowing water, teeth
gritted against the gripping cold, Ninefingers sloshing and gasping
behind her. She could just see an archway up ahead, faint light from
beyond glinting on the water. It was blocked with iron bars, but as
she forced her way close she could see they were rusted through, thin
and flaking. She pressed herself up against them. Beyond she could
see the stream flowing down towards her between banks of rock and
bare mud. Above was the evening sky, stars just starting to show
themselves.
    Freedom.
    Ferro fumbled at
the old iron, air hissing between her teeth, fingers slow and weak
from the cold. Ninefingers came up beside her and planted his hands
next to hers—four hands in a row, two dark and two pale,
clamped tight and straining. They were pressed against each other in
the narrow space and she heard him grunting with effort, heard the
rushing of her own breath, felt the ancient metal beginning to bend,
squealing softly.
    Far enough for
her to slither between.
    She pushed her
bow, and quiver, and sword through first, holding them up in one
hand. She hooked her head between the bars, turning sideways, sucking
in her stomach and holding her breath, wriggling her shoulders, then
her chest, then her hips through the narrow gap, feeling the rough
metal scraping at her skin through her wet clothes.
    She dragged
herself onto the other side, tossing her weapons onto the bank. She
braced her shoulders in the archway and planted her boots against the
next bar, every muscle straining while Ninefingers dragged on it from
the other side. It gave all of a sudden, snapping in half and
showering flakes of rust into the stream, dumping her on her back,
over her head in the freezing water.
    Ninefingers
started to haul himself through, face twisted with effort. Ferro
floundered up, gasping with the cold, grabbed him under the arms and
started pulling, felt his hands grip round her back. She grunted and
wrestled and finally dragged him out. They flopped together onto the
muddy bank and lay there, side by side. Ferro stared up at the
crumbling walls of the ruined city rising sheer above her in the grey
dusk, breathing hard and listening to Ninefingers do the same. She
had not expected to get out of that place alive.
    But they were
not away quite yet.
    She rolled and
clambered up, dripping wet and trying to stop herself shivering. She
wondered if she had ever been so cold in her whole life.
    â€œThat’s
it,â€

The Hero’s Welcome
    It was raining
as Superior Glokta hobbled back into Adua. A mean, thin, ugly sort of
rain on a hard wind off the sea, that rendered the treacherous wood
of the gangplank, the squealing timbers of the wharf, the slick
stones of the quay, all slippery as liars. He licked at his sore
gums, rubbed at his sore thigh, swept his grimace up and down the
grey shoreline. A pair of surly-looking guardsmen were leaning
against a rotten warehouse