Emperor of Thorns

20

Five years earlier

Fexler Brews’ ghost led me through the Iberico Hills. We walked from well before noon until well after, long enough for me to grow weary and for the cuts on my back, just above my hip, to start with that nagging ache and heat that speaks of infection.

The hills held every colour from bone-white through the greys to ochre. Baked mud, crumbling earth, exposed rock. And from time to time some rusting hulk, eroding in that stubborn way that Builder works have about them, refusing the elements century after century. Most of them blocks of metal with no hint of function, looking like steel, pocked and pitted, some large as houses, some askew as if pushed aside by giants, all stained with corrosion in trickled green and powder-white. We passed one that buzzed, a high whine that hurt my teeth, and Fexler vanished until it lay well behind me. In another place a leaning metal column, half-buried, or maybe nine-tenths buried, sang in a voice of staggering beauty and a language unknown to me. I stood with the sun’s heat beating against me and the hairs on end across my neck, just bathing in it.

I saw Fexler only through the viewing ring and perhaps the ring just drew him for me, over-riding the scenery like a painting on glass. Either way he guided me through the dry washes and dusty gullies of the promised land, without speaking, pausing only when I paused.

We passed one machine where the metal sheeting had torn away to reveal spinning cylinders, wheels turning in wheels, all moving in silence, gleaming. It reminded me of the interior of the watch in my pack. Fexler wouldn’t speak of it.

The shadows had grown long when our path following a gully came to dead end hemmed in by crumbling walls of earth and sand. Fexler came to a halt, watching me.

‘Why have we stopped?’ I asked. Not that I wasn’t happy to have stopped — there just seemed no reason for it.

Fexler vanished.

Banging the view ring against the hilt of my sword didn’t restore him. I made a slow turn, completing the circle with my arms spread. Lesha’s stallion watched with mild interest. Balky just looked vacant.

I stepped toward Fexler’s last position and stubbed my toe. A day early an expert had tortured me, albeit very briefly. Stubbing my toe proved more intense and more shocking. I reached shoulder-deep into my well of obscenities and released a string of quite spectacular examples. It deserved a better audience. In time, after all the hopping and cursing, I hobbled over to discover what had lamed me.

With some kneeling, scraping, and brushing, I uncovered a lid of Builder-stone, circular and about a yard across. Rusty stains indicated that the thing had once been secured in place by more than its weight. The spare sword I’d strapped to Lesha’s horse proved useful for levering the lid up the few inches necessarily to shunt it by degrees to one side. It took half a skin of water to replace what the effort had sweated out of me. The sun in those hills is without mercy.

Beneath the lid a shaft led down, unlit, smooth as far as I could tell, and without any odour rising from it. I took a small rock and dropped it into the darkness. It’s not something I could resist doing even if I had no reason for it. The pause before the distant clatter told me that I didn’t want to follow the rock.

‘You could have told me to bring some damn rope!’ I had some despite Fexler’s lack of warning, but I doubted it would be enough.

In a shaft as narrow as the one before me you can brace your back against the wall and your feet on the opposite side, and edge down. However, if the shaft widens, or enters a room, or is smoother than you’d hoped … getting back up might prove difficult. I had come into the Iberico prepared to dare invisible fires. Somehow though, getting stuck in a hole and dying of thirst seemed too pathetic an end to be risked.

I dug the tinderbox from my kit and took off the bandage I’d wrapped around the wound on my upper arm. I had to peel it away, and where the linen stuck it stank, sickly sweet. The dry ends took the flame well enough and burned as it fluttered after the rock I’d dropped in. The sides looked to be parallel all the way down. I guessed it to be some forty-foot deep. I thought a tunnel led off from the bottom but it was hard to tell from my position.

I squeezed the uncovered wound, trying to force the pus out of it. ‘Christ-on-a-bike!’ One of Makin’s oaths, that. I don’t know what a bike is but it sounds painful. The edges of my flesh looked an unhealthy pink, rimmed in black crusts. I couldn’t imagine the two halves ever knitting together again.

The Bad Dogs had plenty of rope at their camp and I’d taken a fair bit of it with me. Never go questing without a bit of rope, at least that’s how the stories have it. My three pieces knotted together reached about two thirds of the way down the hole. I tied a larger knot in one end and secured it under the stone lid rather than trust to my equine companions for anchorage. On my belt I tied the lantern I’d taken from the camp and a spare flask of oil. I squeezed flint, steel, and tinder into a pocket. Better not to carry a light for the descent or a fall might find me with broken legs and on fire.

A tired achiness made each action clumsy. I swallowed another bitter pill of Carrod Springs’ salts and took the rope in both hands. One more glance at the dusty hills, at the worn blue of the sky, and I started down.

Out of the sun I felt cold enough to shiver, though that may have owed more to fever than to the drop in temperature. I climbed down hand over hand, clutching at the rope with my knees. When my knees discovered they had nothing left to clutch, the top of the shaft, part occluded by the lid, offered a bright crescent of sky. A shudder took me, along with the sudden conviction that someone would slide the lid back and seal away the light.

Groaning with the effort, I lifted both feet to brace against the side of the shaft and pushed until my shoulders and upper back wedged against the opposite side. I had no great conviction that the pressure would keep me from falling if I let go the rope, but even less conviction that I could manage the climb back.

I let go.

Inch by strained inch I slid down the shaft. My legs shook with the effort and I felt sure I must be leaving a trail of skin and blood on the Builder stone: my shirt couldn’t have lasted long against the friction.

Sufficient daylight reached down to let me know when the shaft ran out of wall, and soon enough I found that whilst the soles of my boots still gripped the stonework, my heels had nothing to rest on. When a decision is inevitable you may as well take it as quick as possible so that you still have something left to deal with whatever consequences may arise. I dropped, doing my best to swing my feet below me. The effort proved a partial success and ended with bruised heels, banged-up knees, elbows slammed to the ground, and finally the side of my head fetching up against the floor. An inch or so of dust covering the stone floor served to lessen the impact, saving me from a cracked skull and leaving me conscious, choking, and with a river of blood flowing from my nose. I levered myself up so I could sit cradling my knees, and set my back to the nearest wall.

‘Ow.’ The complaint came out nasally.

Pain led my fingers to a piece of the lantern glass embedded in my thigh. I pulled it out and held the wound closed until the blood stopped pulsing around my fingertips. In time I found the lantern wick, set it into the oil flask, and with steel and flint and more fumbling than necessary I set a flame to it. The tunnel led off to front and back, circular in cross-section and looking suspiciously like a sewer. The end of my rope dangled three yards above my outstretched hand and getting back into the shaft would require gymnastics I thought beyond me even without wounds or fever.

On the assumption that water had once flowed along the tunnel I made my best guess at which direction it might have taken and started to walk ‘upstream’. When you’re in a dark place, and your light is going to run out before too long, you get on with things. It’s a wonder to me how few people apply that same logic to their lives.

Three times new tunnels joined mine and on each occasion I studied my choices through the Builders’ view-ring, which shed some light on the matter, a red blinking light that demanded I turn right twice and then follow straight on. At two of the turns traces of rust hinted that metal grilles once blocked the way. A great sage once said there are few problems that won’t go away if you ignore them long enough. Fortunately these obstacles had been pre-ignored for a thousand years.

Toward its end the pipe rose at a steep angle and brought me into a circular room, empty in the main but littered with fragments of plasteek. Brittle with age, they made a satisfying crunch underfoot. Some of the pieces could have been the arms of chairs, small wheels, others lay bonded to the remains of metal cabinets. A corridor led off and I followed it, shadows dancing all around. The place had no odour to it, as if even that staleness which haunts abandoned rooms had given up and left.

A long corridor led me past many doorways all open and dark, decorated with the fragments of the doors that had guarded them. In the ceiling flat strips of whitish glass punctuated the walk and at one point, as I passed below, two of them tried to flicker to life like the glow-bulbs in the Tall Castle.

I’ve wandered the ruins of forts where generations lived, seen the march of empty centuries across the old stone, wearing away the sharpness that defined lives. In those places, at every turn, those lost inhabitants are remembered. The scuffmark where a door closed decade after decade, steps sagging with wear, the deep-scored name where a child set his stamp upon a windowsill. You can read such ruins, however tumbled, almost see the soldiers at the walls, stable-boys leading horses out to exercise. But in the dry corridors of this Builders’ den, untouched by rain or wind, undisturbed, I saw nothing but puzzles and sorrow. I might be the first man to walk here in a thousand years. A thousand more might pass before the next. In such a place silence and dust wait whilst men’s lives slip past. Without the flicker of my flame to count the moments hours could race by, years escape, and I might crawl away ancient and unwise.

The corridor ended in a large hall with many doors, these seemingly of wood but untouched by age.

Silence.

In the times that I have reached after the dead to pull back what is needed to make them rise, it seemed I reached into such a place as this. When I drew Row back into his corpse it was into dry lands that I followed him despite his dying in the mud of the Cantanlona bogs. I thought for a moment of William, of my little brother falling into such a place after they broke him. When I lay as dead after Father’s knife touched my heart I imagined an angel came for me and I refused her. I hoped that years before that day she had descended to the dry lands to make those same offers to William. And that he had not refused.

My head snapped up, jerking me from my half-doze.

‘Enough of this!’ Delirium had started to reel me in. I shook it off and focused. I moved on, snorting at the thought of William and the angel. Even at seven he could probably have given her a harder time of it than I did at fourteen.

At the far end of the hall an archway led into a smaller lower hall. It caught my eye since the Builders weren’t given to arches. A dozen or more cubicles opened to either side of the lesser hall, like monks’ cells, each of them layered in dust, scattered with plasteek fragments and pieces of corroded metal. I picked up a sliver of metal. Lighter than expected, not iron, and not rusted but powdery with some white residue. Oxidation. The word floated up from Lundist’s instructions on alchemy.

The seventh cell on the left held a wonder. A man waited there, without motion, his back to me. And from the side of his head a spray of scarlet blood, fragments of bone tumbling through the air … all frozen in the moment. A picture, but not a picture. Something real and solid but standing outside time. Where each of the other cells had a ring of corrosion in the centre of the ceiling, this one had a collar of silver metal, bound in places with copper, and surrounding a white light. The man sat in his grey tunic directly below the light. Somehow, no illumination escaped into the hall — and yet I saw the light. He sat on a chair that looked too thin to support him, odd in its slim and flowing form, without decoration or device. Beside him, part of a bed. Not a broken piece or a component but a section as if cut out like biscuits from dough, ending at some unseen perimeter that surrounded it and the man both. Beyond this small circle at the cell’s centre, holding the man, the chair, and part of the bed, the remainder of the room lay in dusty ruin like all the rest.

I walked in to touch the man — or the image — perhaps it was an image, like Fexler’s data ghost, just more convincingly drawn. Something the Builders considered art? Invisible glass stopped my fingers. I couldn’t get close to the man. My hand slid across an unseen surface, cool and slick to the fingertips.

The cell proved large enough for me to edge around the forbidden area, stepping through the dust at the margins of the room. The man’s hand came into view, holding a complex piece of metalwork to his head, an iron tube projecting from it to touch his temple.

‘I know this.’ The oldest of my father’s books held pictures of objects similar to this one. ‘It’s a gun.’

Another step and I saw the face, captured in the instant, imagining the pain but not yet feeling it despite the plume of blood and brain and bone behind him.

‘Fexler!’ I’d found the man himself. Not the memory.

The view-ring showed only the room, with Fexler lit red by the light, as if all the time that red dot pulsing amid the Iberico Hills had been this time-locked circle.

I made another circuit around the tableaux. ‘You stopped time!’ I thought about it, then shrugged. They say the Builders could fly. Who knows which is the more difficult, the stopping of time or taking to the skies? I thought of the watch buried in my baggage on Balky’s back. A device of the ancients — perhaps if I stopped its hands turning I would stop time just as they had.

‘You brought me here, Fexler.’ I spoke to the man. ‘What do you want? I can’t fix you.’

Obviously I couldn’t fix him. What had Fexler’s ghost been thinking? The answer came easy enough. Jorg breaks things. Fexler didn’t send me to fix this — he sent me to end it.

Of course breaking things that are sealed away behind unbreakable glass can prove difficult. As the point of my knife slid over the invisible barrier I started to doubt the glass existed at all. It seemed clear that something had to stand between a space where time flowed and a space where it did not. Zeno’s paradoxes sprung to mind. The Greeks loved paradoxes. Maybe they used them as currency. In any case I made no headway.

I walked away, a slight tremble in me from the fever. In every other cell nothing whole survived. I guess that the device in the ceiling had stopped time and in doing so had stopped the process of its own decay.

Memory stole me back beneath Mount Honas. In the Builders’ halls I had seen the remains of many narrow pipes, most just faint traces of verdigris, some bedded in the stone, some running against walls, some so thin that they could only have been strands of wire. The histories have it that the secret fire of the Builders ran along such paths to wake their devices. My watch needed no such fire but perhaps a coiled spring would not suffice for such mechanisms as that which held Fexler. Certainly it had not unwound over all the centuries. Did the machine need to be fed to keep time stationary?

A slow and minute inspection of the walls revealed no sign of hidden paths bringing fire to the ceiling ring. It took an age of hunting the corridors to find something to support me so I could check the ceiling. In the end I found a collection of bottles, like wine bottles but clear and cylindrical and slender as my arm. Binding all nine of them side to side with my shirt I made a very precarious platform on which to stand. Of all the Builders’ artefacts only glass had seen off the years without loss.

From my shifting, clinking platform I discovered that the barrier which enclosed Fexler narrowed as it rose so that at the ceiling I could get to within an inch or so of the metal ring. I used my knife to jab at the stonework around it. Poor treatment for a good weapon, but I had spare blades stashed on Lesha’s horse if I ever got back to him, and nothing else to work with.

Once before, in Gelleth, I had driven a blade into some magic of the Builders, a spirit trapped behind glass in the room before the weapon hall. A shock had run through the sword and thrown me twitching to the floor. The memory made me have to steel myself for each scratch and jab as I scored a circle around the ceiling ring. My muscles remembered the shock and kept trying to refuse to dig out a chance at renewing the experience.

The Builder stone started to flake and powder under my attacks. It took an hour maybe, possibly a day. It felt like a day. Sweat ran down me in hot streams and my arm ached, growing weaker by the moment as arms do when used overhead for more than a few minutes. I jabbed and scored, scored and jabbed. Without warning a deafening bang exploded around me, the light went out, and I fell with glass shattering below.

And for the second time since climbing down the shaft I lay bruised and aching in the dark with broken glass embedded in my leg. My makeshift lantern must have been knocked over and doused when I fell. Instead of searching for it I held the view-ring to my eye. The ring showed me the cell in greenish tones, revealing almost as much detail as I might see in daylight. Fexler lay on the floor, sprawled at my feet, the gun still clutched in his outstretched hand, a wisp of smoke escaping the barrel. Around his head a black and spreading pool of blood.

‘Thank you.’ Fexler — my Fexler from Castle Morrow, a projection of white light — stood beside the corpse, watching the splayed limbs, face unreadable.

‘Fexler, good to see you,’ I said. And it was. Any company in such a place is welcome. I drew a deep breath, taking in the stink of chemicals and fire from the gun, the tang of blood. The Builder halls felt real at last.

‘Why all the silence and mystery?’ I edged through the glass and dust to set my back to a wall, in part for support, in part because it’s good practice.

‘The men of my time lived amongst wonders but they were made no differently from their forefathers who wore skins and ate raw meat in caves, or from their descendants who carry iron swords and live in ruins they can’t comprehend. In short they had the same instincts as any man. Would you trust a copy of yourself?’

‘So they set spells on you such that no data ghost could kill the person from whom they were copied?’ I asked.

‘So that no data echo could harm any human, or ask for them to be harmed, or take actions that might lead them to hurt. It has taken a thousand years of subtle manipulation, of twists and sleights of logic, for me even to reach the stage where I could point someone like you in this direction, Jorg.’

‘And why would you?’ My hand settled on the fallen oil flask. I gave it a swirl. Maybe a fifth of it remained.

‘Data echoes are not just forbidden from harming their original template. In fact whilst the person whose data created any particular echo still lives there are an enormous number of restrictions placed on that echo, for the convenience, privacy, and peace of mind of the person in question. In the world that I inhabit I have been very much a second class citizen for considerably longer than your empire has existed.’

‘In Castle Morrow?’ The world that he lives in?

A tight smile, quick and gone. ‘Imagine an ocean wider and deeper than all others, full of wonder and variety, and on the surface a thickness of ice broken only here and there. The echoes that the Builders left behind, “data ghosts” if that’s how you want to call us, we echoes swim in such an ocean and the places where we may be seen in this thin world of yours are like the holes in the ice where we can surface. We exist in the joined complexity of the Builders’ machinery, and in places such as the terminal at Morrow we may be seen.’

‘So why aren’t you?’

‘Why aren’t we what?’

‘Seen? Why was it just you haunting that cellar?’

Another smile, more of bitterness in it than of friendship. ‘Second class citizen. The menial duties fell to me. Keeping an eye on the savages.’

I had to remind myself that the Fexler who shared anything with me lay on the floor, his blood cooling around him. The Fexler talking to me was not a man, just the idea of a man, an idea held in a machine. I reached out a foot to nudge the dead man. Fexler’s echo shuddered as if the action disturbed him.

‘So why did he kill himself?’ I asked. ‘And what stopped him?’

‘He started a war,’ Fexler said. ‘And finished it.’

‘Hell I lit up one of your suns, it didn’t make me take a knife to my throat straight after.’

‘The weapons Fexler Brews launched could not be detonated with a fire.’

‘You saw that?’ Fexler’s ghost had been watching me six years back, under Mount Honas?

‘Our weapons burned like suns — exactly the same way. Each needs a trigger to ignite it, a smaller, more primitive implosion. Your fire at Silo Eleven using weapons relocated from Vaucluse melted the implosion components into a critical mass. What you saw was a partial ignition of the trigger that would then light the sun. The fuel for the “suns” is short-lived, it’s a matter of half-life, the fuel for the rockets that bore them lasts little longer. All that remains now are the triggers.’

I wondered if the original Fexler had liked the sound of his own voice so much. In any event it was a sobering thought to know I laid waste to Gelleth with a fraction of the spark that would light a true Builder Sun. And despite my words, the dead of Gelleth had haunted me, literally and in dreams. To have burned the whole world in such fashion would have been … uncomfortable.

‘And even with his gun he didn’t manage to kill himself?’ With such toys at their disposal it seemed unforgivable for any Builder to fail in the act of taking a life.

‘These cubicles were designed to hold key personnel in stasis until conditions improved to the point where life might be sustained outside again. Fexler was perhaps not thinking clearly as he sat here wrestling with his conscience. Maybe he didn’t appreciate that the automatic systems would kick in to preserve him or perhaps he just didn’t realize how quickly they could act.’

‘Either way, he left you in the shit along with all the real people in the world.’

‘He did.’ Fexler’s image flickered, a frown above his eyes.

I grinned. It must have been odd to spend a thousand years cursing the man you were copied from. ‘So now I’ve freed you and you get to swim in your sea with the big fish, and not waste time watching the savages. What do I get out of it?’ Still holding the view-ring to my eye I pulled the gun from Fexler’s warm, dead hand, careful not to point the business end my way. He seemed reluctant to let it go.

‘Unfortunately we need to watch the savages even more these days,’ Fexler said. ‘The machines that still keep running won’t run for ever, and unless you people get past swords and arrows there’s never going to be anyone to maintain them. Maintenance requires civilization, and we’re not going to get civilization again until all the wars stop.’

‘You couldn’t stop your own wars, Fexler.’

‘He couldn’t.’ Fexler looked down at his corpse. ‘I’m another matter.’

I pursed my lips. ‘Either way — it sounds as though you’d like there to be an emperor on the Gilden Throne.’