Emperor of Thorns

13

Five years earlier

The silence made it hard to sleep. The quiet seemed to have infected us all, even the horses held their peace, barely a snort or scrape of hoof hour after hour. In place of the night’s muttering my ears invented their own script for the darkness. I heard whispers from the copper box, a taunting voice just beyond hearing, and behind even that, the sound of my own screaming. Perhaps the death of all those cicadas saved me, burned away by the ghost of the Builders’ fire, or maybe built as I am of suspicion and mistrust I would have heard the attackers coming wherever we slept. Somewhere a stone grated beneath the sole of a shoe.

My kick found Lesha first. A stretched hand found some part of Sunny and I pinched it. Had they been road-brothers they would have, depending on their nature, sprung up blade in hand, or frozen where they lay, alert but waiting, until they understood the need. Brother Grumlow would have knifed the hand that shook him, Brother Kent would have feigned sleep, listening. Lesha and Sunny had slept too long in safe beds and started to rise in confusion, grumbling questions.

The predawn hint gave me the enemy as clumps of blackness, low to the dark ground, moving.

‘Run!’

I threw my knife into the nearest threat, praying it wasn’t a rock, then rolled past Lesha and took off at a sprint. The shriek that went up from the new owner of my dagger did more to convince the others of the danger than did my sudden exit.

Running in the dark is foolish but I’d seen the surroundings before the sun set. No bushes to tangle the feet and most of the rocks not big enough to be a problem. I heard the others behind me, Sunny’s boots pounding, Lesha barefoot. Never let an enemy choose the ground. The only consolation in running blind into the night was that whoever meant us harm was now having to do the same.

Memory told me a shallow valley lay ahead, dividing the first swelling foothills of the Iberico. I glanced behind, knowing that if the enemy were too close I would have heard the others go down already. The pursuers had unhooded several lanterns and their lights swung as they ran. Sunny had kept up a good pace and I had a scant twenty yards on him. Already Lesha was lost in the gloom, too stiff in the armour of her scars to run very fast.

I stopped and collared Sunny as he ran past. He nearly gutted me. ‘Get down.’ I hauled him to the ground. The Cuyahoga was out there, chuckling along its stony bed and Lesha had advised against wetting your feet in those waters — if you wanted to carry on walking.

‘What? Why?’ At least he had the sense to hiss his questions.

‘The guide!’ I kept low, crouched and hoping I looked like a rock. Lesha’s feet made an odd noise hitting the dusty ground as she ran. She sounded close, the whoops of pursuit almost as near. She loomed into view and shot past us. I left Sunny to end the first man chasing her as I drove forward into the next two. Behind them the lights of at least four lanterns swung wildly in the hands of running men.

We took them by surprise. I swung left and right, crippled two men, and took off running again. I saw enough to know we had more than a dozen still chasing us, rough irregulars by the look of them. Road-brothers if you like, just not my brothers and not my roads.

I caught up with Lesha soon enough. They would too. Her only chance had been to get to her horse but there wasn’t time.

‘Where to?’ I shouted.

‘Don’t know.’ She panted it out. A useless but reasonable answer.

We let the valley guide us between the hills. Even as we ran the light grew, or rather the greys paled revealing hints at the world. Sunny waited for us where the valley divided, sword in hand, breathing hard. The cries of pursuit rang out behind. Hollers and wolf-howls, as if it were a game to them. It sounded like a lot more than a dozen on our trail.

It occurred to me that we were being herded. I had a couple of seconds to consider the realization before the ground gave way under Sunny. He vanished into a dark hole and I avoided following him by the narrowest of margins. Lesha hit me from behind as I teetered, arms wheeling, on the crumbling edge of the pit, and we went in together.

‘Shit.’

We landed next to Sunny, our fall broken by a pile of sticks and dry grass. Looking up earned me an eyeful of loose earth sifting down and a glimpse of the paling sky, lighter still now viewed from the depths of a pit. To escape would require a climb of twelve maybe fifteen feet. We’d fallen into some kind of natural sinkhole covered to make a trap.

‘Who are they?’ I asked.

‘Bandits.’ Lesha’s voice came soft with terror. ‘Perros Viciosos, Bad Dogs in the old tongue. I didn’t think they came this close to the Iberico.’

‘Let them know who you are, Jorg. They’ll ransom us.’ Sunny tried to climb but slipped back in a shower of dry earth.

‘You don’t believe it half the time, Sunny. You think I’ll convince this lot they’ve caught a king?’

The whooping drew closer, louder. Laughter now. ‘We’ve got them!’

‘Viciosos? That means “bad”?’ It didn’t sound quite right.

‘Vicious,’ Lesha said, stuttering out her words. ‘For what they do to captives.’

The pit smelled of char.

‘Give me a knife,’ I said.

‘Left mine in a Bad Dog.’ Sunny patted his side.

‘It’s all on Garros,’ Lesha said. She’d left her weapons on her horse. Who sleeps like that?

I drew my sword and made a slow arc to check the space. We had room to swing a cat if its tail wasn’t too long. The laughter and mutter of voices increased above. The Bad Dogs were gathering.

I caught Lesha’s shoulder and felt the unheard sobs shudder through her. No swift death waited for any of us. ‘Stand there.’ I pushed her into clear space, stumbling over the broken branches. She turned to me, just the glimmer of her eyes to mark her in the dark.

Light from above. A torch and a man to hold it. He could have passed for Rike’s smaller uglier brother. ‘See what running got you?’

I swung and severed Lesha’s neck in a single clean cut, letting the sword bury its blade in the wall. Before she could fall I had her head in both hands, scarred and heavy, no realization in those eyes yet, and threw it as hard as I could. It struck the bandit square in the face, not on the forehead as I would have liked, but on the nose, mouth, and chin. He staggered one step backward, two steps forward, and fell with a wordless curse. He landed on Lesha’s body. I caught the torch.

‘What the hell?’ Sunny stared in horror and amazement. Mostly amazement.

‘Look at the walls,’ I said. They were black. I stabbed the torch in where the sandy soil would hold it.

The bandit proved as heavy as he looked. I hauled him off Lesha and wrenched my sword clear to hold at his throat. ‘Get up, Bad Dog.’ The sharp edge helped him find his feet. ‘Sunny, get her blood spread around.’

‘What?’

I kicked the brush around my ankles and set my left hand to the pit wall. ‘This wasn’t put here to break our fall.’ My fingers came away sooty. ‘They burn people here.’

More noise from above, an angry debate.

‘You better lower a rope if you want this idiot alive,’ I shouted.

A shrill laugh, more heated words exchanged.

‘Ah, who am I kidding?’ I sliced his throat on the blade of my sword and wrestled him around so the spray of his blood wouldn’t be wasted. ‘Who looks over the edge? It’s not as if he knew we didn’t have a knife to throw.’

Five torches arced in together before the idiot’s neck had stopped pulsing. With the brush damped down and our wits about us we managed to get the torches secured and stamp out any burning patches. The smoke covered the stench of blood and soiled corpses. When we were done Sunny met my gaze.

‘You killed her so you had something to throw?’

‘That would have been enough of a reason — you saw how she moved, she wouldn’t help in a fight. But no.’

‘For the blood?’

‘So I didn’t have to watch them take as long as they could to kill her. If you knew how these sorts of men work, you’d be asking for me to take your head too.’

‘But I get a choice?’

‘You might be useful yet,’ I said.

Our prison looked to be a fissure running for fifteen yards or so, three yards across at its widest where we fell into it.

I searched the idiot and found not one but two daggers, one for brawling, one balanced for throwing. I let Sunny have the bigger of the two.

‘What now?’ he asked. I could feel his fear but he kept it controlled. Holding a sword always leaves you with a little slice of hope.

‘Now we wait for them to figure out how to kill us.’ Anger kept my fear at bay. I wanted to take as many of them with me as could be managed. Dying in a dusty hole in the middle of nowhere hadn’t figured in my plans and knowing that I was going to do just that left a sour taste in my mouth. How the hell did we manage to run into a hole with all this space around us in any case?

‘You in the pit!’ A shout from outside. No heads peeping over this time.

I kept silent. Two more torches arced in, trailing sparks and smoke across the pale sky. It seemed pointless given that five hadn’t done the job. The sharp jab in my shoulder came as I was bending down for the closest brand.

‘What?’ I heard Sunny’s exclamation. If the word ‘what’ had been taken away from him he wouldn’t have had much to say that day.

I could have told him it felt like some kind of venom, but he’d probably worked that out by then. A numbness had spread over my shoulder before I managed to stand, turn, and throw my knife at the dark face behind the blowpipe on the far edge of the pit. I missed. Another dart hit me in the chest, a little black thing half a finger in length.

‘Fuck.’

The third dart set me slumped over my sword, without the strength to look up. It might be said it’s never too hot for armour, but I’d have run slower than Lesha if I’d kept it on.

Men dropped into the pit and they hauled us out of there like meat, ropes round our chests, limbs trailing without sensation. It’s not so hard to keep fear at arms’ length with a sword. When you’re helpless and in the grip of men for whom your pain is the only decent entertainment for miles around, you’d be mad not to be terrified.

Two men had hold of my arms, and the creature that darted me followed along where my heels dragged trails in the dust. My legs were red to well above the knee, dust caking onto the wet blood. The creature looked like a girl, eleven maybe, almost skeletal, burned dark by the sun. She grinned and waved her blowpipe at me.

‘Ghoul darts. From the Cantanlona.’ She had a high clear voice.

‘Hard come by,’ said one of the men on my arms. ‘You’d better be worth it.’

They dragged us three hundred yards or so to a campground. Our horses and Balky were already there, tied to a rail. The horses tugged at their ropes, nervous, thirsty maybe. Balky just looked bored. The encampment seemed semi-permanent, with a few lean-to shacks in even worse condition than those in Carrod Springs, a cart, some water barrels, a chicken or two and in the middle, four thick posts set into the ground. It said a lot about the Perros Viciosos that they had put more construction material and effort into their infrastructure for torture than into their own living arrangements.

I counted about thirty men, as various in their origins and appearance as my own road-brothers, but with a predominance of dark-haired men, Spanards from the interior, an older and more pure bloodline than found in the coast regions, most of them lean and with a dangerous look to them. By my reckoning we’d left five of them dead. None of those in sight bore fresh wounds.

Two men strung Sunny up to one pole then came back for me. The rest watched, or ate, or squabbled over our possessions, or all three. Several men had reached for the box at my hip, but always their hands had fallen away, their interest gone. None of them offered so much as a kick or a punch, as if wanting to keep us in as good health as possible until the fun started.

‘That’s Jorg Ancrath,’ Sunny told them. ‘King of the Renner Highlands, grandson of Earl Hansa.’

The Bad Dogs didn’t bother to reply, just tightened our ropes and set about their business. Waiting is part of the exercise. Letting the tension rise, like bakers’ dough in the tin. Sunny kept talking, kept telling them who I was, who he was, what would happen if we weren’t let go. The girl came over to watch us. She held out a hand filled with a large beetle scrabbling to get away.

‘Mutant,’ she said. ‘Count the legs.’

It had eight. ‘Ugly thing,’ I told her.

She pulled off two of its legs. The bug was big enough for me to hear the crack as the limbs came free. ‘All better.’ She put it down and it took off across the dust.

‘You killed Sancha,’ she said.

‘The big ugly idiot?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I didn’t like him.’

The men set a fire in the blackened space before the poles. A small one, for wood is rare in the Iberico.

‘He’s the King of the Renner Highlands,’ Sunny shouted at them. ‘He has armies!’

‘Renar,’ I said. The numbness started to fade from my limbs, my strength making a slower return.

A woman came out of one of the shacks, a crone with sparse grey hair and a long nose. She unrolled a hide across the ground, displaying an assortment of knives, hooks, drills, and clamps. Sunny set to struggling. ‘You can’t do this, you bastards.’

Only they could.

I knew it wouldn’t be long before he was begging me to get him out of this, then cursing me for getting him into it. At least I didn’t have Lesha doing the same on the other side of me. I knew what would happen because I’d seen it before. I also knew that the quiet ones, the ones biding their time like me, would scream just as loud and beg just as uselessly in the end. I watched the men as they gathered, catching what names I could, Rael, tall and thin with a scar across his throat, Billan, pot-bellied, a salt-and-pepper beard, pig eyes. I muttered the names to myself. I would hunt them down in hell.