The Blade Itself recap

Three men in the declining Union - the Northman Logen Ninefingers, the self-loathing crippled Inquisitor Glokta, and the vain young officer Jezal dan Luthar - are drawn into the orbit of Bayaz, First of the Magi, an old wizard most people took for a legend. While Glokta tortures confessions out of corrupt merchants and is steered by the Arch Lector toward ever more dangerous secrets, and Jezal trains for and wins the great fencing Contest, Bayaz forces his way onto the Union's ruling council and reveals a purpose: a journey to the edge of the World to recover an ancient weapon, the Seed, to save the Union from the Gurkish Empire. By the end he has bound Logen, Jezal, the vengeful escaped slave Ferro Maljinn and others to that quest, and they set out. Glokta is sent south to hold the doomed fortress-city of Dagoska, and Major West marches north with the Union's army to war against King Bethod. Little is resolved; every road is only beginning.

The Union, a fading empire ruled from the great city of Adua, is introduced through three men whose lives have not yet crossed. In the far North, the scarred warrior Logen Ninefingers is ambushed by the inhuman Shanka, is separated from his companions and left believing them dead, and survives a fall into an icy river. Guided by messages from the spirits, he turns south, drawn by a summons he does not understand, and takes up with a half-frozen apprentice, Malacus Quai. In Adua, the crippled Inquisitor Sand dan Glokta - once a famous swordsman, now a torturer who despises himself - is set by his superiors to break confessions out of the Mercers, the powerful merchants' guild, and begins pulling at threads of corruption that lead higher than he was meant to reach. And the vain, idle young officer Jezal dan Luthar trains without enthusiasm for the great fencing Contest under the demanding Lord Marshal Varuz and his friend Major Collem West, while growing interested in West's sharp-tongued, hard-drinking sister, Ardee. In the North, the Dogman and the remnants of Logen's old crew, believing their chief dead, band together to survive under the tyranny of King Bethod.

Glokta's investigation into the Mercers widens into arrests and confessions, and it becomes plain that powerful men want certain questions left unasked; his master, Arch Lector Sult, steers him toward ever more dangerous targets while withholding his true purpose. Into the city walks a bald old man calling himself Bayaz, First of the Magi, who demands the ancient seat his order is owed on the ruling Closed Council. Almost no one believes he is who he claims, and his arrival unsettles the King's ministers, who had assumed the Magi were a legend. He is attended by Quai and, in time, by the boastful Navigator Brother Longfoot. Far to the south, the escaped Gurkish slave Ferro Maljinn, consumed by hatred for the Empire that enslaved her, is hunted across the desert and taken up by the wandering magus Yulwei, who senses something unnatural in her and turns her northward toward Adua. In the North, the Dogman's crew - Threetrees, Tul Duru, Black Dow, Grim and the rest - scrape a living in Bethod's shadow and begin moving toward the Union, carrying warning of the war the North is about to bring south.

Logen reaches Adua and finds himself, to his own bewilderment, taken into Bayaz's strange household, treated by the magus as a useful man rather than a savage. Bayaz forces the Closed Council to reckon with him, demonstrating a flash of real and frightening power to men who had dismissed him. Jezal, hardened by Varuz's brutal training and sharpened by his feelings for Ardee, fights his way through the rounds of the great Contest and wins it, defeating the hulking Bremer dan Gorst in the final and becoming, overnight, a celebrated man. Glokta, having survived the fallout of the Mercer affair, is handed new and more perilous work by Sult and Superior Goyle, drawn deeper into the secret rivalries of the Inquisition and the Closed Council. Across the Union the mood darkens: King Bethod's demands press on the northern border and war is all but certain, while in the South the Gurkish Empire and its Prophet, Khalul, are stirring toward a reckoning of their own. Bayaz, meanwhile, keeps his real intentions to himself, gathering the pieces he means to use.

At the book's close the scattered threads knot into a single design. Bayaz gathers his chosen company - Logen, Ferro, Jezal, the apprentice Quai and the Navigator Longfoot - and binds them to a long journey west, out past the edge of the map, to recover an ancient weapon left over from the Old Time: the Seed, which he insists is the only thing that can turn back the Gurkish. None of them fully trusts him, and Jezal in particular goes unwillingly, but each is caught up and carried along. The company leaves Adua and sets out into the ruined lands beyond the Union. At the same time the Union prepares for war on two fronts. Arch Lector Sult appoints Glokta Superior of Dagoska, the Union's isolated southern fortress-city, and sends him south to hold it against the gathering Gurkish - a posting from which his predecessor simply vanished. Major West is assigned to the army marching north to fight Bethod under the command of the vain Crown Prince Ladisla, and before he goes he asks Glokta to watch over his sister Ardee, whom Jezal is leaving behind. The three men who opened the book estranged now stand at the start of three separate roads - a quest, a siege, and a war - with Bayaz alone knowing where any of them truly lead.

The Blade Itself ends by launching three separate journeys rather than resolving anything. Bayaz has assembled his company - Logen, Ferro, Jezal, the apprentice Malacus Quai and the Navigator Brother Longfoot - and led them out of Adua on a quest west to the edge of the World for the Seed, an ancient weapon he claims can defeat the Gurkish; the travellers are bound to him more by circumstance than by trust. Glokta has been made Superior of Dagoska by Arch Lector Sult and dispatched to the Union's crumbling southern city, tasked with holding it against an imminent Gurkish siege and with discovering what became of the predecessor who disappeared. Major Collem West has joined the Union army heading north to fight King Bethod under the incompetent Crown Prince Ladisla, leaving his sister Ardee in Glokta's keeping. Jezal, newly famous as Contest champion, leaves Ardee behind with real regret. War with the North is certain and war with the South is looming, Bayaz's true nature and intentions remain hidden, and none of the men he has set in motion can see where he means to take them. Everything is arranged; nothing is yet decided.