Emperor of Thorns

14

Five years earlier

While the old woman worked to expose Sunny’s ribs, the girl brought me her latest find. She held the scorpion’s claws together in one tight fist and kept the stinger stretched out with the other hand. Eight legs writhed in a fury of motion. The thing had to be a good twelve inches from claw tip to sting. I could see the strain of holding it in the small knots of muscle along her arm bones.

‘What?’

‘It’s not right!’ She had to shout to be heard amid Sunny’s screaming.

‘Mutant?’ It looked fine to me, just much bigger than I like my scorpions.

The old woman tossed down another strip of skin and two scrawny chickens chased after it. The men, crowded before the posts, cheered. Most of them sat cross-legged with some kind of liquor to hand in waxed leather tubes from which they sipped. All of them seemed content to let the crone ply her trade. Some chatted between themselves, but most showed an interest and would applaud the deft knife-work at the completion of each stage. I noted that one man had found Lesha’s head and held it in his lap, angled toward the posts. There were few among the Bad Dogs who matched the intensity with which she watched us.

‘Not mutant. Wrong.’ She strained to crack the creature’s back but couldn’t. The legs kept up the frenzy of writhing. ‘Can’t you hear it?’

I could barely hear her over Sunny’s screaming, let alone her new pet. In truth I think he screamed to take his mind off what was being done, the real hurting had yet to start. Torture is more than pain and the Perros Viciosos knew it. Certainly the old woman knew it. She hadn’t really begun on him yet, but the mutilation hurt worse than agony that leaves no mark. When the torturer does damage that obviously won’t heal they underscore the irreversibility of it all. This won’t get better. This won’t go away. It lets the man know he is just meat and veins and sinew. Flesh for the butcher.

The girl, Gretcha, held the scorpion to my face. I craned away, rewarded by a full view of Sunny’s chest, the white of rib bones showing through the narrow slots cut to reveal them. Veins stood out in sharp relief across his neck, eyes screwed shut.

I heard it then, the strange whir, click, and tick behind the dry thrashing of legs. It set me in mind of the noise when I put the Builders’ watch to my ear, the sound of cogs, of metal teeth meshing with impossible precision. I turned and stared at the thing and for one fragment of a second its black eyes blinked crimson.

Gretcha threw the scorpion down and started to chase it, beating at it with a heavy stick. One blow broke most of the legs along the left side. She vanished from the corner of my eye still chasing the crippled arachnid. I could turn my head no further. The red flash echoed behind my eyelids and for some reason I saw Fexler’s red star once more, blinking over the Iberico.

It took the better part of an hour for the old woman to finish her work and in that time she used most of the tools from the wrap she had rolled out at the start. She made an artwork of Sunny’s chest and arms, cutting, searing, tearing pieces away, unpeeling layers, pinning them back. He howled at her of course, and at me, demanding release, that I do something, begging me, and before long he swore terrible revenge, not on his tormentors but on Jorg Ancrath who had brought him to this fate.

Fear ran in me — how would it not? Terror ran through me in a hot rush, then as ice along veins, making my fingers and face prickle with pins and needles. But I tried to fool myself that I sat in the audience, watching with the casual cruelty of road-brothers at rest. And to some degree I succeeded for I have sat and watched, on too many occasions, from the times before I really understood such suffering to the times where I understood it and didn’t care. The strong will hurt the weak, it’s the natural order. But strapped there in the hot sun, waiting my turn to scream and break, I knew the horror of it and despaired.

At last the crone stepped back, red to the elbows, but with scarcely a drop on her clothes or face. She turned to her audience, mocked a curtsey, and went back to her shack with her tools in their roll beneath one arm.

Cheers from the crowd, some quite drunk now. Harsh rasping breaths from Sunny, his head hanging low, one eye wide and staring, the other tight shut. The tall man, Rael, stood and advanced to secure Sunny’s head to the post with leather straps. Off by the shacks someone took a piss, another man scattered grain for the hens.

‘Gretcha!’ The round-bellied man, Billan, called out for the girl.

She came from behind the posts with the slash of a grin on her skull face, dropping a handful of broken insect parts, legs and glossy black plates. Billan set a stool for the girl to stand on, close to Sunny’s post.

Gretcha went to the fire without further prompting and took the iron that had been set there. I hadn’t seen it placed. She grasped it by the cloth-wrapped end and held the dull orange end toward us. ‘No!’ Sunny understood the leather straps around his forehead. I couldn’t blame his struggles. I would be struggling and telling them no when my turn came.

In the fire strange shapes danced. The sun made ghosts of the flame and I had to squint, but I saw them, shapes and colours that had no place there. Delirium setting in from the heat and terror. Perhaps madness would claim my mind before they even started on me.

‘You’re too loud.’ Gretcha pushed the hot iron into Sunny’s mouth. His clenched lips shrivelled away before the iron’s glare. Teeth cracked at the iron’s touch. I heard them. They became brittle and shattered as she pushed. Steam poured from his mouth, steam and awful screaming and the smell of roasting.

I looked away, blinded with tears as the little girl put his eyes out. I could say I wept for Sunny, or for the horror of a world where such things happen, but in truth I wept for myself, in fear. At the sharp end of things there is only room for ourselves.

The Bad Dogs whooped and cheered at the sport. Some called out names, presumably of the men who we had killed, but it meant nothing. We would have suffered the same tortures if they had captured us in our sleep without loss.

‘Gretcha.’ Billan again. ‘Enough with that one. Mary will find something more in him later. Put the other’s eye out. Just one. I don’t like the way he’s been looking at me.’

The girl pushed the end of the iron into the hot embers and stood watching it, her back to me. I pulled at my bonds. They knew how to tie a man, not just at the wrists but at the elbows and higher too. I pulled anyhow. Anger rose in me. It wouldn’t stand before the iron, but for a moment at least it chased away some measure of the fear. Anger at my tormentors and anger at the foolishness of it, dying in some meaningless camp filled with empty people, people going nowhere, people for whom my agony would be a passing distraction.

When Gretcha turned back I met her gaze and ignored the hot draw of the iron.

‘Keep a steady hand, girl.’ I gave her a savage grin, hating her with a sudden intensity so fierce it hurt.

Are you dangerous? I had asked the Nuban when they held the irons over him. I’d given him his chance, loosed one hand, and he had seized it. Are you dangerous? Yes, he had said, and I told him to show me. I wanted that chance now. Let her say the words. Are you dangerous?

Instead her smile fell away and her hand wavered, just a touch.

‘Stop!’ Rael called. ‘His head isn’t bound. You could kill him.’

He came across and secured me with more straps. I watched him, trying to commit each detail of his face to memory. He would be one of the last people I saw.

‘Give me the iron.’ He snapped the words out, taking it from Gretcha’s hands. ‘I’ll do this one myself.’ Returning my glare he said, ‘You might be a lord of some sort. You had enough gold on you. And this.’ He held up his wrist to show the watch from my uncle’s treasury. ‘But we both know that if you were ransomed you would do nothing but hunt us from the moment you were free and safe. I can see it in you.’

I couldn’t lie to him. There would be no point. If I were free I would hunt them over any distance at any cost.

‘Looks like you’ve done this before.’ Rael nodded at my cheek. ‘Maybe we should start where they left off, just to remind you how it felt.’

The red-hot tip of the iron approached the thick scar tissue reaching across the left side of my face. No waver in Rael’s hand however fierce my stare. Gretcha stood beside him, her head reaching only a little past his waist.

The heat scorched my lips and dried the wetness from my eyes, but in the scar-tissue no pain, just a warmth, pleasant almost. The burn had killed all sensation in that flesh, I could scratch it with my nails and only feel the tugging in the untouched skin just below my eye. The iron rested a little below my cheekbone with the pressure of a poking finger. Puzzlement reshaped Rael’s brow.

‘He won’t b-’

A sudden pulse of pleasure flushed through the scar tissue, almost orgasmic, and a flash of heat closed my eyes. The stink of my hair crisping filled my nostrils. Rael screamed and when I looked again the dance had him. That dance men do when unexpected agony seizes them, a stubbed toe or blow to that tricksy bone in the elbow will start it off often as not. He held the wrist of his right hand in the grip of his left. And there, seared across the exposed palm, deep enough to reach the little bones that fill the hand, the line the iron had left on him. The iron itself lay in the dust, bright and shining, as white with heat as if it were at the bellows’ mouth in a forge, the cloth burning around it.

I had to laugh. What were they going to do if I laughed at them? Hurt me? In the shock of it I had bitten my tongue and I laughed now with the taste of blood filling my mouth and the warmth of it running crimson over my lips.

‘Idiot.’ Billan got up and pushed Rael out of his way. He caught my chin and jaw in a painful grip. ‘What did you do, boy?’

‘Boy?’ It hurt to get the word out with his fingers digging into my jaw muscles. I didn’t know what I’d done but I was glad of it. I suspected something in the fragments of Gog bedded in that scar had reacted to the touch of so much heat.

‘Answer me.’

Even now Billan thought he had something to threaten me with. I spat blood into his face. He staggered away with a girlish shriek and that set me laughing all the more. Hysteria had me in its claws. Others among the Perros Viciosos got to their feet. One slab of muscle named Manwa, brother to Sancha who I killed in the pit, took Billan’s arm and tried to settle him. A dirty rag set to the blood didn’t seem able to wipe it off. Seconds later a better view showed that the skin itself had turned scarlet where the blood touched, and in his eyes the blood had scalded his cornea a milky white. It seemed the necromancy that lurked within me and would kill small things through just a touch of my fingers, really did run in my veins.

‘Get Old Mary back!’ Billan shouted it in his blindness. The effort to hold himself back, to deny the lust to choke the life out of me, made him tremble. ‘I want him to scream for a month.’

‘You won’t live a month, Billan. When your brothers understand that your sight isn’t coming back … how long before they tie you to this post do you think?’ I couldn’t stop smiling. Hysteria and bravado would be cut from me quick enough when the crone brought her knives, I knew that, but hell, laugh while you can, no?

Manwa pulled out his sword, which turned out to be my sword. ‘He has a sword of the old-steel and he works magic.’ He turned the blade in his huge fist. He was a big man but his hands belonged to a giant. ‘Maybe we should ransom him? The other one said Earl Hansa would pay for them.’

Rael spat, his face tight with suffering. A burned hand leaves a man no peace. ‘He dies. He dies hard.’

Manwa shrugged and sat down, my sword across his knees.

Two men led Old Mary back to the posts. I saw them first from the corner of my eye and watched so close that I almost didn’t notice the rope go slack around my ankles. Behind the complaints and curses of the Bad Dogs, behind the wet unnatural sobbing from Sunny, I heard a click and whir and a scrabbling like fingers clawing wood. Something fought a path up the post at my back, on the far side. Schnick. The rope around my knees fell away. Nobody noticed.

Mary unrolled her tool-wrap out across the dust again. She gave me a mean look as if I was really going to get it now for disturbing her rest. Again the absurdity of it twitched at the corners of my mouth. She drew the sharpest of her blades, a small cutting edge on a cylindrical metal shaft, the sort of thing Grecko doctors might use for slicing out a canker. Three steps brought Mary to me, unsteady on her feet, sure of hand. She cut away the stained remnants of my shirt. The blade didn’t pull as the cloth parted before it.

‘That’s a very ugly wart you have there, Old Mary,’ I said.

She paused and looked at me. She had mean old woman eyes, very dark.

‘Oh sorry. I mean the one down on your chin. Ugly thing. Couldn’t you just slice it off? With that nice sharp knife of yours? Trim some of those wattles too? We don’t want them calling you Ugly Old Mary now, do we?’

Something dry and unpleasant scrambled over my bound hands. I shivered as hard little legs moved over my wrists. It took all my remaining composure not to twitch the thing off me.

‘Are you stupid?’ Mary asked after the longest pause. She hadn’t said a word to Sunny the whole time she worked on him.

‘Did I hurt your feelings, Old Mary?’ I smiled at her, my teeth crimson no doubt. ‘You know that however much I shout and beg, those words can’t go back in the box don’t you? You are ugly and old. There’s nothing we can do about it, Mary. I expect little Gretcha will be doing your work soon enough and you’ll be her journeyman piece. I wonder what shapes she’ll cut you into?’

The Bad Dogs watched me now, their arguments forgotten. Even Rael and Billan gave up on their hurts for a moment to give me their attention. Victims threaten or plead. Old Mary didn’t know what to make of mockery.

Schnick. My wrists were free. Blood started to flow into them. It hurt worse than anything I’d suffered on the torture pole thus far.

Old Mary shook her head and brushed aside a lock of grey hair. She looked annoyed, less sure of herself. Here she was, ready to open me up piece by piece, and I’d made her self-conscious with throw-away commentary on her wartiness. I grinned wide enough to crack my face. I felt pretty sure they’d have to kill me once I got free. The prospect of attacking them rather than expiring on that pole just flooded me with joy. I couldn’t stop smiling.

‘Cracked, this one.’ Mary set the point of her knife at the extreme right of my lowest rib.

I strained for the faint noise of my saviour crawling up the pole. If it cut the rope across my chest and upper arms everyone would notice it fall and I would still be secured by the head. They hadn’t set a rope around our necks, presumably to stop us choking when straining to get away from the pain.

Mary made her cut. They say sharp knife, no tears. The cutting didn’t hurt, but an acid wash of pain followed in the knife’s wake. It took all my restraint to keep from kicking her away and betraying myself.

‘Ouch,’ I said. ‘That hurts.’

Mary drew back to make a lower cut parallel to the first. Behind me the creature slipped and fell.

‘Oh crap!’ I shouted it. Amazingly Old Mary startled back and several of the Bad Dogs flinched. Somehow the creature caught on my hands, a bite or a grip, I didn’t know, but I did know it really hurt. ‘OUCH! Fuck it!’

Mary blinked. I had one thin slice in me — she didn’t understand.

‘You’re going to do the same thing again?’ I demanded. The creature released its grip and climbed back over my hands to the pole. It felt like a giant crab, or spider. Jesu, I hate spiders. ‘You’re going to do the ribs all over again like you did on Sunny?’ I flicked my eyes his way. ‘You’re supposed to be good at this, to make it interesting to watch! No wonder they’ve got Gretcha ready to replace you.’

‘The ribs are boring,’ somebody called out behind her.

‘It’s good when she breaks them out.’ That was Rael.

‘We’ve got one ready for that.’

‘Something new!’

Slight vibrations as the creature reached the chest rope. Shit. I tensed ready to struggle like hell when it came free. More vibration and the thing moved on, up, the rope intact.

‘Come on Ugly Mary, show us something new.’ A dark-skinned youth near the back.

Mary didn’t like that at all. She scowled at me, showing yellow stumps of teeth. Muttering, she turned and bent for a thin hook.

The creature moved behind my head. My hair pulled where strands were bound up in the leather. A claw slid under the strap that bound my forehead.

Mary faced me, straightening as much as her back allowed. She kept the hook low as she advanced, at groin level, smiling for once.

Schnick.

I pressed forward and the rope around my chest gave. The creature must have sawed through, leaving just a strand to hold it.

Conjurers will hold your attention where they want it and in doing so can leave you blind to what else is happening before your eyes. Mary’s hook held the Bad Dogs’ attention. The last rope on me dropped away and, like magic, nobody saw it fall.

The madness in me, some virulent mix of terror and relief, put me in mind to scratch my nose then return my hand behind me. Sanity prevailed. I overcame the temptation to waste the moment by sinking Mary’s hook into one of her eyes. Instead I moved forward, very swift, and snatched my sword from Manwa’s lap.

I strode into the midst of them.

To avoid grappling and capture it’s best to keep to the edge, but they had bows and somewhere, more of those darts. By striking to the middle I kept them disorganized, close. And as I moved through them I laid about me. Before the first of the Dogs gained their feet I had opened wounds on four men that would never close.

There’s a freedom in being surrounded on all sides by enemies. In such circumstances, with a heavy blade that’s sharp enough to make the wind bleed, you can swing in grand and vicious circles and your only care need be to ensure the weapon isn’t locked into the corpse of your last victim. In many ways I had lived most of my life in exactly such a condition, swinging in all directions with no worry about who might die. Experience served me well on the edge of the Iberico Hills.

The Bad Dogs died, parted from heads, from limbs, without time for one man to fall before the point of my sword ploughed a red furrow through the next. Not before or since have I taken such unadulterated joy in slaughter. Some cleared their weapons, swords, knives, sharp little hatchets, cleaver-axes, but none lasted more than two exchanges with me: a swift parry and they went down on the riposte. I got cut, in three places. I didn’t know about that until much later, until I found that some of the blood wouldn’t clean away.

Once, with men advancing from many directions, I spun and found Manwa in front of me. Instinct wrapped my spare hand around his knife hand and twisted me to the side. Hatred drove my forehead into his nose. He was a tall man, powerful, but I had grown tall, and whether rage multiplied my strength or my muscle matched his I don’t know, but his knife didn’t find me. In fact I kept it for a dozen more bloody moments, cutting and thrusting, until I left it in Rael’s neck.

It helped that many of them were drunk, some too intoxicated on blind-shine even to find their weapons, let alone swing them to good effect. It also helped that I hated them all with such purity, and that I had trained at swordplay for months, day in, day out, until my hands bled and the sword-song rang in my ears.

A fat man fell away from me, guts vomiting in blue coils from his opened belly. Another man, already running, I cut down from behind. Turning, I saw two more Dogs running toward the valley. One I brought down at fifty paces with a hatchet scooped from the ground. The other escaped. The silence was sudden and complete.

By the posts Mary stood with Gretcha at her side. The girl had one small hand knotted in the old woman’s skirts, the other holding her blowpipe, levelled at me. I walked toward them. Pfft. Gretcha’s dart hit my collarbone. I snatched the pipe from her and threw it behind me.

‘We’re very much alike, Gretcha, you and I.’

I squatted to be level with the girl. The dart came out with a pull and I let it fall into the dust. She watched me with dark eyes. I saw a lot of Mary in her. A granddaughter perhaps.

‘I can help.’ I smiled, sad for her, sad for everything. ‘If someone had done this for me when I was a child it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.’

Her mouth made an ‘oh’ of surprise as the sword passed through her, grating on thin bones. She slid off the blade as I stood.

‘Ugly. Old. Mary,’ I said.

She still held the hook. I caught her around her scrawny neck but she didn’t try to stick me with it. Necromancy tingled in my fingertips, reacting to her age maybe. My fingers found the knobbles of her spine and I let death leak into her, enough to make her crumple to the floor.

Sunny still lived. His gasping made the only sound in that silence that settles over carnage. Some of the Bad Dogs would be wounded but alive. If they were though they managed to stay quiet about it and sensibly keep themselves from my attention.

Close up Sunny’s injuries screamed at me. I sensed the hurt coursing through him in red rivers. Necromancy knows about such things. With a hand against his chest it seemed I knew him blood to bone, that I knew the branching of his veins, the shape of his spine, the beat and flutter of his heart. I had no healing though, only death. Thick mucus, flecked with char, oozed from his eye sockets. His tongue lay scorched and swollen in a broken mouth.

‘I can’t help you, Greyson Landless.’

The effort that raised his eyeless head to me tore through the necromantic threads between us and ripped a gasp from me. I cut his ropes and lowered him to the ground. I wouldn’t see him die bound.

‘Peace, brother.’ The point of my sword rested above his heart. ‘Peace.’ And I made an end of him.

Greyson’s suffering still trembled in my hands. I knelt beside Old Mary, crumpled in the dirt, watching me with bright eyes, dust on the trail of drool across her cheek. With one hand on her scrawny neck and one atop her head I let Sunny’s pain free. It seems that a necromancer’s fingers can do in moments with strokes and pinches what all her sharp instruments took hours to achieve. Her heart couldn’t take it for long and death reached up for her. She died too easy.

Lesha’s head lay in among the bodies. I retrieved it, killing one malingerer on the way. Most corpses echoed with some remnant of the person when I touched them. Row’s flesh had reeked of him. But Lesha’s head felt empty, not literally, not scooped out, but free of any trace of her, a shell. Somehow it pleased me, that she had gone beyond reach. Somewhere better I hoped.

I set her head beside Sunny, ready to bury. First though, I walked around the posts. The scorpion, missing three legs on one side, some armour broken away from its back, clung motionless to the rear of the post I had been bound to. The leather strap that held my head still hung from its claw. The scorpion’s head lifted a fraction as I approached it, and once more the dark beads of its eyes glowed crimson.

‘Fexler?’ I asked.

It twitched twice and fell from the post, landing on its back. One more convulsion and it wrapped tight with a loud crackling noise, its armoured plates seizing in permanent embrace.

‘Damn.’