Emperor of Thorns

19

Five years earlier

Two knives broke in the effort to uncoil the scorpion. When I locked its tail in place with Old Mary’s clamps and levered it apart using a sword, the corpse opened in a series of jerking releases, accompanied by crunches like glass breaking under a heel.

‘You’re something made,’ I told it. ‘A clever piece of clockwork.’

I could see no cogs or wheels though, no matter how close I squinted. Just black crystal, traces of clear sparkling jelly and multitudes of wires, most of them so thin as to be on the edge of invisible.

‘Something broken.’ I put it into Lesha’s saddle-pack to take with me.

It took hours to dig two graves. My wounds stung and smarted. Later they ached and throbbed. I used an axe to break up the ground and a shield to scoop the soil away. The earth tasted sour, worse than the salts from Carrod Springs.

I buried Greyson first. I found a visored helm, scoured it out with sand, and put it on him to cover his face. ‘You be sure to grumble, wherever you find yourself, Sunny.’ Two shield-loads of dust and grit stole the detail from him. Just another corpse. Four more and he made little more than an undulation in the earth. Ten more and I smoothed the ground over.

I set Lesha’s head against her neck. I felt it the right thing to do since I had separated them in the first place. The pieces didn’t seem to fit.

‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Lesha together again.’

I sat beside the grave without looking at her, watching the sun drop toward the west. ‘These men, they weren’t any different to me and mine.’ My cuts stung and throbbed. I thought of how much hurt I’d escaped and the complaints went away. ‘Being at the sharp end of the stick changes your view on the business of poking, sure enough — you’d have to be pretty stupid not to see that one coming though.’ I stopped talking. It wasn’t so much that there wasn’t anyone to hear. When you’ve got death in you and you’re surrounded by corpses, well you’re always going to have some kind of an audience. It was more that what gripped me was too fluid, too uncertain to be captured and spoken. Words are blunt instruments, better suited to murder than to making sense of the world. I filled the grave. It was time.

The sun clung to the horizon with crimson fingers. I straightened and paused mid-step. Red eyes watched me, the sky reflected in the gaze of the fallen. Too many heads lay turned my way for chance to have set their course. Coldness pulsed from the old wound in my chest, necromancy, a numbness like the ghouls’ darts brought, or a detachment maybe, as if some unseen hand were closing around me, walling away the world’s vitality. Close by, Rael lay, a knife in his throat, skewering the old scar where some past attempt had failed. I took my step and his eyes followed the motion.

‘Dead King.’ The words bubbled up, the blood so dark it ran purple over his teeth.

‘Hmmm.’ I picked up the sturdiest of the discarded axes. The Perros Viciosos had favoured axes. The heft of it held a certain comfort. A quick shake rid me of wearies and I set to my task. It’s hard work taking the limbs off a man. The legs especially take a lot of hacking, and flesh is much tougher stuff than you might imagine. As soon as you lose the edge on an axe it tends to bounce off a leather-clad thigh if your stroke is anything but perfect. With luck you’ll break the bone in any case, but to hew the whole limb off? Think cutting down trees: always far harder than you think it should be. By the end my breath came in gasps and sweat dripped from my nose. I settled for taking off hands and feet from the last ten men before collapsing in a cross-legged slump before Rael once more.

‘Life was much easier when death held on to what it was given,’ I said.

I couldn’t tell if Rael still watched me but the Dead King’s presence lingered in the stink of old blood.

‘I’m thinking if you could stand these lads up again you would have done it by now, but better safe than sorry, neh?’

Still nothing. The Dead King seemed to have Chella under his thumb, so that made his interest in me … unsettling.

I leaned in over Rael’s corpse and rapped on his forehead. ‘Hello?’ Gathering my own traces of necromancy and reaching in didn’t seem like the best idea, rather like using your fingers to take a bone from a hungry dog.

Nothing. Perhaps the king had a lot of dead eyes to peer out of — too many people to scare for more than a quick name check with each. I shrugged. At the bottom of it the Perros Viciosos weren’t any more frightening dead than alive. It didn’t mean I wanted to spend my night sleeping among them though. They surely smelled worse dead.

I led Lesha’s horse away from the camp and settled a hundred yards off over a low ridge. Despite myself I slept poorly, haunted by Sunny’s screams and prodded awake by each small noise in the darkness.

Dawn found me back at the Bad Dogs’ camp. I blessed the Iberico’s poisons for the lack of flies and rats. What beauty there is to war is in the moment. After a day any battlefield is little more than carrion and scavengers. In the Iberico at least the carrion doesn’t swarm with flies. In fact, apart from my own indulgence with the axe, the dead looked untouched with only the occasional large and hardy cockroach digging in for breakfast.

I collected my bits and pieces. Balky favoured me with a reproachful stare as I loaded him. I tethered the mule to Lesha’s stallion, and led them both off into the promised land.

Without Lesha’s guidance I had nothing to stop me walking into the invisible fires that had scoured her so badly. We walk a knife-edge each day though, and most don’t know it — at least in the promised lands, in the Iberico, in Kane’s Scar and Ill-Shadow back in Ancrath, in such places there’s no pretence, no lie of safety, no deception that like the ancients’ song, ‘love is all you need’. At a single false step you can and will burn. As always.

At times I let Lesha’s horse precede me, but horses like to be led and prodding him along made for slow going.

The first time I saw it I wasn’t sure what my eyes were telling me. On a slope to our right a shoulder of weathered Builder-stone broke through the shale. Above and around it the air shimmered in a heat haze. The burned side of my face throbbed with it, and in the moment I closed that eye with wincing — the haze vanished. Looking once more, and only with the eye so nearly blinded when Gog burned me, I saw the shimmer again, like the ghosts of flame that had danced on Jane beneath Mount Honas.

‘Get along.’ I pulled Balky up on his tether. He let out a hee-haw loud enough to crack rocks. The notion to push him through that shimmer came and went. Other considerations aside, I’d have to carry my own kit. If one of those mouse-sized roaches had been handy I would have tossed that through. A stray thought occurred. I dug out the view-ring from my pack and held it up to watch the phenomenon through. In an instant, shades of red wrapped the world, painted in thick crimson around the shoulder of old stone, fading to less violent hues further down the slope. Along our path at the bottom of the dry valley the ring showed occasional regions of dull orange hanging mist-like.

‘Damn but that’s handy. What else can you show me?’

And like the genie from Aladdin’s lamp, Fexler Brews stood before me on the road, no larger than life and no smaller. I took a step back, the kind of step that seeks no permission and springs from the days when men’s fear was written into the marrow of our race. The kind I always regret. I held the ring aside and Fexler vanished along with the shades of red and orange. Brought back and he returned with the ring.

‘What am I doing here, Brews?’ I felt silly talking to something seen only though a small loop of steel, even out in the wilds with none but horse and mule to watch me.

Fexler spread his hands. He wore the same whites he had back at Castle Morrow, not a speck of dust on them.

‘Why the mystery? Just tell me plain and-’

He turned and walked away down the valley.

‘Hell.’ And I followed, hauling Balky after.