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Read An Exclusive Chapter From ‘The Trouble With Peace’ By Joe Abercrombie

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Years ago, I read The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie and was absolutely blown away.

The unique blend of grimdark fantasy, cutting wit and a cynicism that’s at once equal parts horrifying and hilarious, set in a fully realized world with complicated, deeply flawed yet sympathetic characters had me hooked. The twists and turns at the end of the third book, The Last Argument of Kings, shook me to the core.

That trilogy alone would have made for a perfectly satisfying end to the world of barbaric Northmen, politicking lords and conniving wizards that Abercrombie had created. But he went on to write three more stand-alone novels set years after the first trilogy, following new characters in new, strange lands (not to mention a parade of short stories) all of which further fleshed out the world-building, conflict and scope of the story.

And now we’ve come to The Age Of Madness. Set a generation after the events of the first trilogy, and some years after the events of the stand-alone novels which bridge these two trilogies, The Age Of Madness trilogy is set at the dawn of the industrial age. The same old conflicts between the Union and the Northmen—and the Union and the Gurkish empire—rage on. New technology is changing the way of life for the Union’s citizens, as more and more farmers are tossed off their land and head into the cities to work in factories. The old ways of doing business, for both the peasantry and the gentry, are quickly unraveling.

And yet, as the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Old schemes persist. Old hatreds die hard. The same pawns are pushed across the same old board. And one very loathsome wizard sits at the center of it all, with a smugness that knows no bounds.

MORE FROM FORBES'A Little Hatred' Review: Joe Abercrombie's 'First Law' Meets An Age Of Machines And Madness


I reviewed the first novel in the new trilogy, A Little Hatred, here. And because Abercrombie is admirably prolific, I’ll be reviewing The Trouble With Peace in the next couple of weeks prior to its September 15th release. More recently I revealed the cover of the second novel, The Trouble With Peace.

Now I’m able to share with you this exclusive excerpt. It’s a chapter from the point-of-view of Savine dan Glokta, daughter of Sand dan Glokta, the arch lector and shadow-king of the Union.

Savine learned some troubling things about her identity and parentage at the end of A Little Hatred, and made some questionable decisions in the wake of that knowledge. Now she finds herself in a number of binds, not the least of which is a healthy dose of PTSD. Still, she’s plenty stubborn and plenty capable, a savvy businesswoman as clever and as ruthless as her father. And very rich, troubles or no.

But other complications arise, as you’ll soon find out.

MORE FROM FORBESBehold, The Cover Of Joe Abercrombie's Next Novel 'The Trouble With Peace'

Don’t read on if you haven’t read A Little Hatred, as there are some pretty major spoilers in the following text. If you haven’t read any of Abercrombie’s work, then get thee to a bookstore post-haste! Start with The Blade Itself and go from there. While I suppose this trilogy could be read without reading any of the previous books, I wouldn’t recommend it.

In any case, enough from me. Here’s what you’ve come for.


A Sea of Trouble

~from The Trouble With Peace by Joe Abercrombie

“Welcome, one and all, to this fifteenth biannual meeting of Adua’s Solar Society.”

Curnsbick, resplendent in a waistcoat embroidered with silver flowers, held up his broad hands for silence, though the applause was muted. The members used to raise the roof of the theatre. Savine remembered it well.

“With thanks to our distinguished patrons—the Lady Ardee and her daughter Lady Savine dan Glokta.” Curnsbick gave his usual showman’s flourish towards the box where Savine sat, but the clapping now was yet more subdued. Did she even hear a few tattletale whispers below? She’s not all she was, you know. Not one half of what she was…

“Ungrateful bastards,” she hissed through her fixed smile. Could it only have been a few months since they were soiling their drawers at the mention of her name?

“To say that it has been a difficult year…” Curnsbick frowned down at his notes as though they made sad reading. “Hardly does justice to the troubles we have faced.”

“You’re fucking right there.” Savine dipped behind her fan to sniff up a pinch of pearl dust. Just to lift her out of the bog. Just to keep some wind in the sails.

“A war in the North. Ongoing troubles in Styria. And the death of His August Majesty King Jezal the First. Too young. Far too young.” Curnsbick’s voice cracked a little. “The great family of our nation has lost its great father.”

Savine flinched at the word, had to give her own eye the slightest dab with the tip of her little finger, though no doubt any tears were for her own troubles rather than a father she had hardly known and certainly not respected. All tears are for oneself, in the end.

“Then the terrible events in Valbeck.” A kind of sorry grumble around the theatre, a stirring below as every head was shaken. “Assets ruined. Colleagues lost. Manufactories that were the wonder of the world left in ruins.” Curnsbick struck his lectern a blow. “But already new industry rises from the ashes! Modern housing on the ruins of the slums! Greater mills with more efficient machinery and more orderly workers!”

Savine tried not to think of the children in her mill in Valbeck, before it was destroyed. The bunk beds wedged in among the machines. The stifling heat. The deafening noise. The choking dust. But so awfully orderly. So terribly efficient.

“Confidence has been struck,” lamented Curnsbick. “Markets are in turmoil. But from chaos, opportunity can come.” He gave his lectern another blow. “Opportunity must be made to come. His August Majesty King Orso will lead us into a new age. Progress cannot stop! Will not be permitted to stop! For the benefit of all, we of the Solar Society will fight tirelessly to drag the Union from the tomb of ignorance and into the sunny uplands of enlightenment!”

Loud applause this time, and in the audience below, men struggled to their feet.

“Hear! Hear!” someone brayed.

“Progress!” blurted another.

“As inspiring as any sermon in the Great Temple of Shaffa,” murmured Zuri.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say Curnsbick has taken a stiffener himself,” said Savine, and she ducked behind her fan and sniffed up another pinch. Just one more, to get her ready for the fight.

Battle was already joined beneath the great chandeliers in the foyer. A sparser melee than at recent meetings. Less buoyant. More bitter. Hungrier dogs, snapping over leaner pickings.

The press reminded her of the crowd in Valbeck when the Breakers brought food around the slum. They wore silk rather than rags, they stank of perfume rather than stale sweat, the ever-present threat was of ruin rather than violence, but the jostling and the hunger were very much the same. There had been a time when Savine was as comfortable in this crawling activity as a queen bee in her hive. Now her whole body tingled with chilly panic. She had to smother the urge to lash out with her elbows and run screaming for the door.

“Calm,” she mouthed to herself, trying to let her shoulders relax so her hands would stop shaking, instantly losing all patience and flexing every muscle instead. “Calm, calm, calm.”

She squeezed her face into a smile, snapped out her fan and forced herself into the midst of the press with Zuri at her shoulder. Eyes turned in her direction, expressions harder than she was used to. Assessing, rather than admiring. Scornful, rather than envious. They used to crowd around her like pigs around the one trough in the farmyard. Now the most tempting morsels went elsewhere. Savine could scarcely see Selest dan Heugen through the swarm of gentlemen competing for her attention. Only a flash of that garish red wig. A snatch of that hideous, brash, overdone laugh that other women were beginning to imitate.

“By the Fates, I despise that woman,” muttered Savine.

“The highest compliment you could pay her,” said Zuri, with a warning glance up from her book. “One cannot despise a thing without acknowledging its importance.”

She was right, as always. Selest had enjoyed success after success since she invested in that scheme of Kaspar dan Arinhorm’s, the one that Savine had so pointedly turned down. Her own interests in Angland’s mines had taken quite the beating since he began to install his new pumps across the province.

And those were far from her only disappointing investments of late. Once she made businesses bloom just by smiling at them. Now every apple she bit into turned out rotten. She was not left alone, that was sure. But her fan was busier beckoning the suitors in than waving them off.

She was obliged to talk to old Ricart dan Sleisholt, who had some mad fantasy of making power by damming the Whiteflow. You could tell at a glance he was one of life’s losers, the shoulders of his jacket liberally dusted with dandruff, but it was vital that she look busy. While he blathered on, she sifted the flood of conversation around her for opportunities as a prospector sifts the Far Country’s icy streams for gold.

“… cutlery and drapery and crockery and clocks. People have money and they want things…”

“… heard Valint and Balk called in his loans. Magnate in the morning, beggar by afternoon. Salutary lesson for all of us…”

“… property in Valbeck. You wouldn’t believe the price I got on some vacant land. Well, I say vacant, but these scum are easily moved…”

“… impossible to know which way the Closed Council is going to fall on tax. There’s a hell of a hole in the finances. The entire treasury’s a hole…”

“… told ’em if they wouldn’t do the work, I’d bring in a crowd of brown bastards who would, and they soon got back to their machines…”

“… nobles furious, commoners furious, merchants furious, my wife isn’t furious yet, but it never takes much…”

“And so you see, Lady Savine,” Sleisholt was working up to a grand finale, “the power of the Whiteflow is languishing unharnessed, like a stallion unbridled, and—”

“If I may!” Curnsbick caught Savine’s elbow and steered her nimbly away.

“Unbridled, Lady Savine!” Sleisholt called after her. “I am available to discuss it further at your convenience!” And he dissolved into a coughing fit which faded into the chatter.

“Thank the Fates for you,” murmured Savine. “I thought I’d never escape that old dunce.”

Curnsbick glanced away while rubbing significantly at his nose. “You have a little something just here.”

“Fuck.” She dipped behind her fan to wipe a trace of powder from the rim of her sore nostril.

When she came up, Curnsbick was looking worriedly at her from under his grey brows, still flecked with a few stubborn ginger hairs. “Savine, I count you as one of my closest friends.”

“How lovely of you.”

“I know you have a generous heart—”

“You know more than me, then.”

“—and I have the highest regard for your instincts, your tenacity, your wit—”

“It takes no great wit to sense a ‘but’ coming.”

“I’m worried for you.” He lowered his voice. “I hear rumours, Savine. I’m concerned about… well, about your judgement.”

Her skin was prickling unpleasantly under her dress. “My judgement?” she whispered, forcing her smile a tooth wider.

“This venture in Keln that just collapsed, I warned you it wasn’t viable. Vessels that size—”

“You must be delighted at how right you were.”

“What? No! I could scarcely be less so. You must have sunk thousands into financing the Crown Prince’s Division.” It had been closer to millions. “Then I hear Kort’s canal is hampered by labour problems.” Utterly mired in them was closer to it. “And it’s no secret you lost heavily in Valbeck—”

“You have no fucking idea what I lost in Valbeck!” He stepped back, startled, and she realised she had her fist clenched tight around her folded fan and was shaking it in his face. “You… have no idea.” She was shocked to find the pain of tears at the back of her nose, had to snap her fan open again so she could dab at her lids, struggling not to smudge her powder. Never mind her judgement, it was getting to the point where she could hardly trust her own eyes.

But when she glanced up, Curnsbick was not even looking at her. He was staring across the busy foyer towards the door.

The eager chatter fell silent, the crowd split and through the midst came a young man with a vast retinue of guards, officers, attendants and hangers-on, sandy hair carefully arranged to give the impression of not having been arranged at all, white uniform heavy with medals.

“Bloody hell,” whispered Curnsbick, gripping Savine’s elbow, “it’s the bloody king!”

Whatever the criticisms—and there were more than ever, regularly circulated in pamphlets revelling in the tawdry details—no one could deny that King Orso looked the part. He reminded Savine of his father. Of their father, she realised, with an ugly twisting of disgust. He chuckled, slapped arms, shook hands, traded jokes, the same beacon of slightly absent good humour King Jezal had once been.

“Your Majesty,” frothed Curnsbick, “the Solar Society is illuminated by your presence. I fear we had to begin the addresses without you.”

“Never fear, Master Curnsbick.” Orso clapped him on the shoulder like an old friend. “I can’t imagine I would have been much help with the technical details.”

The great machinist produced the most mechanical of laughs. “I am sure you know our sponsor, Lady Savine dan Glokta.”

Their eyes met only for an instant. But an instant was enough.

She remembered how Orso used to look at her. That mischievous glint in his eye, as if they were players in a delightful game no one else knew about. Before she learned they had a father in common, when he was still a crown prince and her judgement was considered unimpeachable. Now his stare was flat, and dead, and passionless. A mourner at the funeral of someone he had hardly known.

He had asked her to marry him. To be his queen. And all she had wanted was to say yes. He had loved her, and she had loved him.

Their eyes only met for an instant. But an instant was all she could stand.

She sank into the deepest curtsy she could manage, wishing she could keep sinking until the tiled floor swallowed her. “Your Majesty…”

“Lady Selest!” she heard Orso say, his heel clicking sharply as he turned away. “Perhaps you might show me around?”

“I’d be honoured, Your Majesty.” And the bubbling of Selest dan Heugen’s victorious laughter was as painful as boiling water in Savine’s ears.

It was a slight no one in the entire foyer could have missed. Had Orso knocked her down and trodden on her throat, he could scarcely have done more damage. Everyone was whispering as she stood. Scorned, by the king, at her own function.

She walked to the doors through swimming faces, smile plastered to her burning cheeks, and stumbled down the steps into the twilit street. Her stomach roiled. She pulled at her collar, but she could sooner have torn through a prison wall with her fingernails than loosened that triple stitching.

“Lady Savine?” came Zuri’s concerned voice.

She tottered around the corner of the theatre into the darkness of an alley, doubled up helpless and sprayed vomit down the wall. Puking made her think of Valbeck. Everything made her think of Valbeck.

She straightened, dashing the burning snot from her nose. “Even my own stomach is betraying me.”

A strip of light down the side of Zuri’s dark face made one eye gleam. “When did your menses last come?” she asked, softly.

Savine stood for a moment, her breath ragged. Then she gave a hopeless shrug. “Just before Leo dan Brock’s visit to Adua. Whoever would have thought I’d miss the monthly agonies?”

Probably her ragged breaths should have turned to choking sobs, and she should have fallen into Zuri’s arms and wept at the colossal mess she had made of herself. Curnsbick was right to worry, the old fool. Her judgement had turned to shit and here was the result.

But instead of sobbing, she started to chuckle. “I’m puking,” she said, “in a piss-smelling alley, in a dress that cost five hundred marks, with a bastard on the way. I’m fucking ridiculous.”

The laughter faded, and she leaned against the wall, scraping her sour tongue clean on her teeth. “The higher you climb, the further you have to fall, and the greater the spectacle when you hit the ground. What wonderful drama, eh? And they don’t even have to pay for a ticket.” She clenched her fists. “They all think I’m going down. But if they think I’m going down without a fight, they should—”

She doubled over and brought up more sick. Just an acrid trickle this time. Retching and giggling at once. She spat it out and wiped her face on the back of her glove. Her hand was shaking again.

“Calm,” she muttered at herself, clenching her fists. “Calm, you absolute fucker.”

Zuri looked worried. And she never looked worried. “I will ask Rabik to bring the carriage around. We should get you home.”

“Oh, come, come, the night is young.” Savine fished out her box for another pinch of pearl dust. Just to get over the humps. Just to keep things moving. She headed for the street. “I’ve a mind to watch Master Broad work.”


The Trouble With Peace is out soon, landing on bookshelves and digital readers on September 15th. Look for my review on my blog.

You can pre-order the novel, including signed editions, at the links below:

US:

UK:

  • Goldsboro Limited Edition: 500 Signed & Numbered with Sprayed Edges in UK First Edition, First Printing
  • Waterstones signed edition
  • Toppings signed and dedicated (personalised dedications limited to 100 copies)
  • Amazon

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