Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3) (27 page)

The carriage juddered into motion again and before long rolled on into smooth mud and tinkling ice crusts.

‘The road is flooded – we’re fording.’ Kai, head back against the rests, eyes closed. ‘There’s a pyre of sorts in the town square. No bones.’

Kai had told her his wind-sight grew hand in hand with his dead-sight. She hated him the more for it. His eyeballs twitched beneath his eyelids, looking ahead of them, seeing what she could not. Still, she allowed herself a smile. There were things ahead that Kai would not see coming, however far his vision rode the wind. The Dead King’s cunning had set them on this path. Two necromancers sent to Congression. The necromancy necessary to his purpose, and just as necessary the fact that they stood close enough to life to pass as untainted, Kai too new to his calling to raise alarm, and she too distant from her old power to seem a threat.

Dark waters seeped around the door join as they went, the carriage half-floating now. Then, as it seemed they would sink, the wheels found the road once more and they jolted back onto dry land. Chella caught the stink of roast meat.

‘It’s a funeral pyre.’

‘There are no bones,’ Kai said. ‘And the festival flags are out. A celebration maybe?’

Chella knew death. She shook her head.

Stepping from the carriage she jumped to the ground before it came to a halt.

‘What is it?’ Kai dropped down behind her.

Chella raised a hand to silence him, not that she listened with her ears, but it felt good to shut him up.

‘Screaming …’ she said. Horrible agony. Her skin burned with it. A hand rose before her face and for a moment she didn’t recognize it as hers, hanging on invisible thread, one long finger, bony in the knuckle, pointing. The questing hand settled, indicating the open waters between the town and a nearby copse. ‘There.’

‘I can barely sense it,’ Kai said.

‘It’s hiding.’ Chella brought her hands together before her, shaping her will. She might have only an echo of her power but she wielded what she held with lifetimes of experience. ‘Help me bring it out.’

Drawing forth dead things from behind the veil always put Chella in mind of the cesspit back in Jonholt. A hot summer and the stink rose between the boards, acrid, strong enough to make her eyes water that day, the day she dropped Nan Robtin’s brooch. Dropped was the wrong word. She had pinned it carefully to her smock, piercing coarse wool with the steel pin. And even so it fell, turning in the air, sparkling, making diamond fractures of the light, though it was only glass and mirror. She missed the brooch twice in the air, fingers brushing it, then fumbled it, sending it skittering across the boards and down the dung hole.

For the longest time Chella had stood and stared at the hole. The image of the sparkling brooch falling into darkness played across her vision. She hadn’t asked to take it. Nan would have said no.
It’s borrowing if you bring it back
, she had told herself.

‘Stealing if you don’t,’ she whispered, there by the cesspit behind the scrub lilacs.

She had lain flat upon the boards, nose wrinkled, breath held against the physical force of the stench. Cheek to the wood, arm reaching down, the stained boards scraping her bicep through her smock. Fingers found the filth, the coldness surprising, a crawling sensation of revulsion as she dipped in, stomach heaving, her hand enveloped now, wanting to make a fist and yet stretching out, questing.

The need to draw breath built in her chest, a hammering demand. Eyes screwed tight. Toes curled, legs drumming, hand questing. YOU WILL BREATHE. And in the end the body’s wants prove stronger than the mind’s and you always take the breath.

Chella had lain gagging, a thin spill of acid spew drooling from her panting mouth, and still her fingers hunted in a cold world, half-solid, half-liquid.

And after all that – the sudden bite of the brooch pin made her scream and whip her hand out, empty, splattering filth.

‘The trick,’ she muttered to Kai, ‘is to let it bite.’

When the bite came Kai fell shrieking, and Chella endured with grim satisfaction, hauling to bring out what was lost and hidden. Weak as she was, Chella used the life that filled her to tempt and anchor her prey. At the last, when her bones threatened to tear through flesh and skin if she did not release her hold, Chella pulled harder still and a mist began to coil about the surface of the flood. Frost patterns spread beneath the mist, racing in wild, angular profusion over dark water.

It rose in a splintering of ice, something both more white than the frost, blacker than the waters, a creature of bone-pale limbs cast with midnight shadow, blade-thin, hands dividing root-like into three fingers. And somehow, despite the lack of defining features, undeniably female. Mouthless, her pain scaled a different register, resonating in an ache deep in the sockets of Chella’s teeth. Men of the guard staggered around her, choking, tearing at their eyes.

‘Keres!’ Chella named the lichkin, sealing it back into the world.

‘What happened?’ Kai climbed to his feet, hauling in a breath. ‘I can see it. What’s changed?’

‘I—’ Something
had
changed, the lichkin lay revealed, stripped of its shroud of ghosts.

Kai clenched his jaw against the lichkin’s resonating agony.

The ghosts were gone – flayed away.

And in that moment Chella understood.

‘She’s been skinned.’

Five years earlier

I lay a long time in the dark, gripped by fever. I lay in the dust beside the fresh corpse of a thousand-year-old man and from time to time, when my mind grew clear enough to understand the slurred demands of my leathery tongue, I drank.

Without light and without sound, dreams cannot be told from delirium. I talked to myself – mutters and accusations – and sometimes to Fexler, face-down, the back of his head a wet mess of soft and sharp. I held his gun – my totem against terrors in the night. In the other hand I clutched the thorn-patterned box, refusing the urge to open it even in the madness of fever.

I spoke to my demons, addressing each with long and dreary monologues as I twisted in the dust. Lesha’s head watched me from the alcove where the pills had been, her skin luminous, blood oozing black from the stump of her neck. Sunny came eyeless to stand vigil, the words from his seared tongue as incoherent as mine. William came hand in hand with mother, her eyes worried, his hard as stones.

‘I tried to save you.’ Same old story – no new excuses from Jorgy.

He shook his head, blood and curls. We both knew thorns would not have held him.

The dead of Gelleth came to stand watch, and my brothers from the mire, collected by Chella just for me.

And in time Fexler’s medicines worked their slow magic, my fever broke, and dreams faded into darkness, William’s eyes the last to go, hanging like an accusation.

‘I’m hungry.’ The bones of my spine grated as I sat up.

I didn’t know how long I’d lain there – long enough for Fexler to smell the wrong kind of sweet. But even that didn’t stop the growling of my stomach.

I made a meal of the hardtack in my pack, finding it with blind fingers and chewing in the dark, spitting out the occasional inedibles fished out by mistake. I looted Fexler without squandering my light, a fingertip search discovering and exploring his many pockets. In one hand I held my blunted knife ready, not trusting his cold and stiff corpse to suffer my attentions without protest. He lay quiet, though. Perhaps the Builders had the means to defend their halls from such influences just as the seals the mind-sworn place on royal tombs hold their charges safe. I found a lightweight rectangular box, like a card case, with heavy, rattling contents, elsewhere several flexible cards that felt like plasteek, tubes that might have been writing instruments in his breast pocket. All of them went into my pack.

At last, when I felt ready to move, I relit my flask-and-wick lamp.

Getting into the shaft proved every bit the nightmare I had imagined it. Climbing up to a point at which I could snag the rope proved worse. Missing the rope, falling, and having to repeat the process nearly ended my tale with a dusty skeleton at the bottom of a deep, dry hole.

When I heaved myself out into the noonday sun, bloody-handed, panting, too dry to sweat, Balky and the stallion were waiting where I left them, offering the same looks they had seen me off with. The stallion had flecks of white foam on his muzzle and both carried the signs of dehydration, sunken flesh and an unhealthy glitter to the eyes. I stood before them, bent over with exhaustion, heaving in my breath, eyes screwed tight against the brightness of the day. I wondered if the Builder-ghosts felt this way when they came out into one world from another. Did they have to struggle from the deep places of their strange existence to emerge like Fexler did, painted by machines for human eyes? Those old ghosts watched me as I straightened, as one hand lifted to shield my gaze. I sensed their attention. As blank and unreadable as the mule’s and surely more alien.

The last of the water from the skins on the stallion’s back did little more than take the edge from our thirst when split three ways. I would have taken it all of course had I not thought we could all three make it out and back to the Bad Dogs’ barrels.

The Bad Dogs’ camp held few signs of its former masters. A split bone here and there, the weapons, tatters of cloth, scraps of armour, all filmed over with dust. I stayed long enough to take one of Toltech’s bitter pills and fill my water-skins.

I took a look through the view-ring before I left. Part of me wanted to see Fexler there, to tell him how much his freedom had cost, to see if he cared. The ring showed nothing, just the world through a hoop of silver-steel. As I took it away the view flicked to the one seen from the lower slopes of paradise, nations laid out in browns and greens, without regard for the boundaries on men’s maps, the oceans swirled about in deepest blue. And there, on the coast to the south, on the thin arm of sea that divides our lands from Afrique … a red dot, burning.

‘I’m not your toy, Fexler. You can’t set me chasing across empire to join your little dots.’

Balky snorted, as if wondering whether I’d gone mad in the heat. I put the ring away. ‘Dammit.’ I’d been planning a journey to that exact spot.

‘King Honorous Jorg Ancrath.’ The flunky with little rod for rapping doors afforded me the introduction he omitted on my first visit.

The provost sat in her ebony chair as if she had remained there since I left, seated the whole time with her ledgers and tallies, amid the geometric splendour of her Moorish halls. The writing desk beside her lay empty, the scribe perhaps dismissed while the provost checked his work. She watched me cross the floor with sufficient interest to pause her quill-scratching.

‘Sanity prevailed, King Jorg?’ she asked. ‘You turned back before the Hills? When I sent Lesha to guide you I had hope that it would be her scars that showed you the way – back through the city gates.’

‘Your granddaughter was both a caution and an inspiration, Provost.’ I came to the step of her dais and offered a deeper bow than she merited. I carried bad news after all. ‘She was an explorer. Our world needs more like her.’

‘Was?’ The old woman didn’t miss much. I felt rather than heard the tensing of the two men at the door.

‘Outlaws attacked our camp while we slept. Perros Viciosos.’

‘Oh.’ That made her old, those two words. Years that had only toughened now for a moment hung their weight upon her head. ‘Better to have found the fire a second time.’

‘Lesha died in the struggle before we were taken, Provost. My man, Greyson, was not so lucky. His was a hard death.’

And yet you survived.
She didn’t say it. The Hundred and their spawn have an instinct for survival and it never pays to ask the cost.

The provost sat back in her chair and set her quill on the armrest. A moment later she let her papers fall. ‘I have sixteen grandchildren you know, Jorg?’

I nodded. It didn’t seem the time to say ‘fifteen’.

‘All bright and wonderful children who ran through these halls at one time or other, shrieking, laughing, full of life. A trickle of them at first, then a tide. And their mothers would put them on my lap, always the mothers, and we’d sit and goggle, young to old, a mystery to each other. Then life would sweep them on their way, and now I could more quickly tell you the names of the sixteen district water marshals than of those children. Many I wouldn’t recognize in the street unless you told me to watch out for one.

‘Lesha was a bold girl. Not pretty, but clever and fierce. She could have done my job maybe, but she was never meant for city life. I’m sorry now that I didn’t get to know her better. More sorry for her father, who knew her even less well perhaps but will weep for her where all I have are excuses.’

‘I liked her. The same force pushed us both. I liked Greyson too,’ I said.

It struck me that finding someone I might call a friend had been a rare thing in my life. And in the space of three short months I’d discovered and lost two.

‘I hope whatever you found proves worth the sacrifice.’

The gun hung heavy at my hip, wrapped in leather. Almost as heavy as the copper box on the hip opposite. The provost took up her quill again. No talk now of receptions, feasts with merchants, mass with the cardinal. Perhaps she first wanted to tell her son that his daughter was dead.

‘A man who can’t make sacrifices has lost before he starts, Provost. There was a time when I could spend the lives of those around me without care. Now, sometimes, I care. Sometimes it hurts.’ I thought for a moment of the Nuban falling away after I shot him. ‘But that doesn’t mean that I can’t and won’t sacrifice absolutely anything rather than allow it to be used to rule me, rather than have it be made into a way to lose.’

‘Well now, there’s an attitude that will serve you well at Congression, King Jorg.’ The provost offered me a grim smile, tight in the creases of her face.

‘Your granddaughter though was not something I gave up to advance my cause. I did my best to save her from pain.’