Emperor of Thorns

18

Chella’s Story

‘What you’ve seen so far will not prepare you for this. Make a stone of your mind. Swear any oath that is asked of you.’ Chella straightened the collar of Kai’s robe and stood back to look at him again.

‘I will.’

Ten years had settled on the young man overnight, tight lines around his mouth, lips narrowed. He wore the weariness around his eyes and in them. She hadn’t broken him. You can’t make necromancers from broken men. It’s a contract that must be entered into of one’s own will, and Kai had just enough of an instinct for self-preservation to will it. Beneath his charm and easy ways Chella imagined a hardness had always waited. She walked on and he followed her along the corridor.

‘Don’t look at any of them. Especially not the lichkin,’ she said.

‘Christ! Lichkin!’ He stopped and when she turned he backed away, the colour running from his face. For a moment it seemed that his knees would buckle. ‘I thought the king’s court were necromancers …’

‘The lichkin should be the least of your concerns.’ Chella couldn’t blame him. You had to meet the Dead King to understand.

‘But …’ Kai frowned. She saw his hand move beneath his robe. He would be holding the knife she gave him, taking comfort in a sharp edge. Men! ‘But if they’re dead, shouldn’t we be the ones to give the orders?’

Fear and ambition, a good combination. Chella felt her lips twist, a sour smile. He had barely started to sense the deadlands, this one, made his first corpse twitch only hours before, and already he thought himself a necromancer and reached for the reins. ‘If they were fallen then yes, a necromancer would have raised them and a necromancer would rule them.’

‘They’re not dead?’ Again the frown.

‘Oh they’re dead. But they will never be ours to command. The lichkin are dead — but they never died. It’s given to us to call back what cannot enter heaven and restore it under our command to the flesh and bones it once owned. But in the deadlands, where we call the fallen from, there are things that are dead and that have never lived. The lichkin are such creatures and they are the Dead King’s soldiers. And in the darkest reaches of the deadlands, amongst such creatures, the Dead King came from nowhere and crowned himself in fewer than ten years.’

She walked on and after a moment’s hesitation Kai followed. Where else had he to go?

They passed several doors on the left, and shuttered windows on the right. A storm-wind rattled the heavy boards but the rain had yet to fall. Two guards waited at the corner, dead men in rusted armour, a faint aroma of decay about them overwritten by the eye-watering chemicals used to cure their flesh.

‘These are strong ones. I can feel it.’ Kai paused, lifting his hand toward the pair as if pressing against something in the air.

‘Not much of these passed on,’ Chella said. ‘Bad men. Bad lives. It left a lot to be called back into the body. Cunning, some measure of intelligence, some useful memories. Most of the guards here are like this. And when you find a corpse you can refill almost to the brim, well you don’t want it to rot away on you now, do you?’ The dead men watched her with shrivelled eyes, their dark thoughts unknowable.

More corridors, more guards, more doors. The Dead King took the castle only months before from the last Brettan lord of any consequence, Artur Elgin, whose ships had sailed from the port below for twenty years and more, terrorizing the continental coasts north and south. Artur Elgin’s days of terror weren’t over. Indeed they had very much begun, though now he served the Dead King, or rather what had been called back from the deadlands did, and Chella suspected that was pretty much all of the man.

Chella sensed the Dead King always, from a thousand miles she felt him as something crawling beneath her skin. In the castle where he laid his plans no place was free of the taste of him, bitter on the tongue.

At last they came to the doors to Artur’s court, slabs of old oak with black iron hinges scrolling out across them. The bog-stink wrinkled her nose. Mire-ghouls watched them from the shadows to either side, some with black darts clutched in stained hands. Before the doors two giants, each more than eight foot tall, freaks from the promised lands, their dena scorched by the Builders’ fire so that they grew wrong. Big but wrong. And now dead. Meat-puppets held by the necromancers’ will.

The giants stepped aside and Chella moved toward the doors. The presence of the Dead King overwhelmed that of his court, reaching through stone and wood to swamp her senses. In the fullness of Chella’s necromantic power, when she stepped as far from life as a person can and still return, she knew the Death King’s presence as a dark-light, a black sun whose radiance froze and corrupted but somehow still drew her on. Now though, dressed only in the tatters of her former strength, with her blood pumping once again, Chella felt her master as a threat, as something sculpted from every memory of hurt or harm or pain, screaming hatred in a register just beyond hearing.

She set her hands to the doors and found them trembling.

The stink of lichkin hits flesh like ink hits blotting paper: it sinks bone-deep, overriding irrelevances such as the nose. Men are busy dying from the moment they’re born but it’s a crawl from the cradle to the grave. Being near a lichkin makes it a race.

The Dead King’s court lay in darkness but as Chella pushed the doors open a cold glow began to spread within the chamber. Ghosts, tight-wrapped around their masters, began to unfurl, like an outer skin, flayed from the lichkin by the presence of life. The spirits burned with the light of their own misery, pale apparitions, delicate tissues of memory, membranes of misused lives. The lichkin themselves were blind spots on her living eyes, as if patches of her retina had died, folding the room’s image over itself in those places. In times when the necromancy ran deep in her and her blood lay still, Chella had seen the lichkin, bone-white, bone-thin, the wedge of their eyeless heads filled with small sharp teeth, each hand dividing into three root-like fingers.

‘Kai!’ She felt his retreat. The sound of his name made him stop. He knew better than to run.

The Dead King sat on Lord Artur Elgin’s driftwood throne. He wore Artur Elgin’s robes. They fitted him well. Blue-leather shoulders, a laced front fixed with silver clasps each set with sea-stone, the leather giving over to thick velvet of a deeper midnight blue. He wore Artur Elgin’s body too, and it fitted him less well, hunched and awkward, and when he lifted his head to Chella the smile that he made with the dead man’s mouth was an awful thing.