Emperor of Thorns

23

We made progress, not good progress but enough. Sometimes the guard didn’t get their charges to Vyene on time, but it hadn’t happened in my lifetime. Even when a member of the Hundred died en route, their corpse would make a punctual arrival.

When towns and villages lay at convenient points we spent the night in commandeered accommodation, otherwise tents were pitched in fields or clearings. I liked those nights best, Katherine and Miana lit by firelight in woods where cold mists threaded the trees, each woman framed by the fur trim of winter robes, all of us huddling close to the heat. Gomst and Osser in their chairs with wine goblets in hand debated as old men do, Makin and Marten kept by the queen ready to make up for my failings, Kent sat quiet, watching the night. Rike and Gorgoth bookended our little band, soaking up the warmth, both looking meaner than hell.

On one such night, with the crackle of the fire and the glow of many others dotted about us through the wood, Miana said, ‘Jorg, you sleep so much better out of the Haunt, why is that?’ Her breath steamed before her in the night and though she faced me it was Katherine that she watched.

‘I’ve always loved the road, dear,’ I told her. ‘You leave your troubles behind you.’

‘Not if you bring your wife.’ Rike snorted and kept his gaze on the fire, immune to the sharp look Marten sent his way.

‘In the Haunt you always talked in your sleep.’ Miana turned to face Katherine now. ‘He practically raved. I had to set my bed in the east tower just to get some rest.’

Katherine made no reply, her face still.

‘But now he sleeps like a sinless child, without murmur,’ Miana said.

I shrugged. ‘Bishop Gomst is the one with night terrors. Should we worry when our holiest rest uneasy?’

Miana ignored me. ‘No more “Sareth”, no more “Degran”, and no more endless “Katherine! Katherine!”’

Katherine arched one eyebrow, delicate, expressive, and delicious. Miana had been irritable all day in the carriage, but then if I’d swallowed a whole baby and it insisted on kicking the hell out of my insides I might be less than my normal tolerant self.

A stick popped with a loud retort, sending embers from the fire.

Defence is always a weakness and I didn’t feel like attacking, so I waited. Katherine had so many options open to her — I wanted to know which she would take.

‘I trust King Jorg only called my name out in torment, Queen?’

I wondered what her hands were doing under that fur wrap. Twisting? Sliding toward a knife? Still and collected?

‘It’s true.’ Miana smiled, quick and unexpected, her frown erased. ‘He never did seem pleased to see you.’

Katherine nodded. ‘My nephew has many crimes to answer for, but the darkest are against my sister, Queen Sareth and her child. Perhaps as he says his sins are left behind on the road. Maybe when we stop at Vyene they will catch up with him once more.’

None around the fire made any move to defend me from the charges.

I spoke up for myself. ‘If there were any justice, lady, God himself would reach down and strike me dead, for I am guilty as you say. But until he does, I will just have to keep moving on and doing what I can in the world.’

Gorgoth surprised me then, his voice so deep at first you might think it a trembling in the ground itself. It took me a moment to understand he had started to sing, something wordless, elemental like the crackle of the fire, and captivating. For the longest time we only sat and listened, the stars wheeling overhead, frosty in the night.

For three nights and days rain thundered from leaden skies, drowning out conversation in the carriage and attempting to drown pretty much everything else outside. The roads before us became rivers of mud. The rivers themselves grew to dark and swirling monsters wielding trees and carts as they surged past. Captain Harran led his force along the alternative routes planned out against such eventualities, taking us through larger towns, through cities where the stone bridges had ridden out many a flood.

I took to Brath’s saddle again. After days pressed against the warmth of Katherine’s cool indifference I could do with a cold shower.

‘Making your escape, Jorg?’ Makin rode up beside me as I pulled away from Holland’s carriage.

The road led like a causeway through a sea of flooded pasture, the waters broken only by half-drowned hedgerows. Hours later the rain failed and the sky cracked open along a bright fault-line. The still waters all around became mirrors, every lone tree reflected, bare fingers reaching below as well as above. So much of the world is about surfaces, the eye deceived, with the truth in the unknown and unknowable depths beneath.

‘Damn.’ I shook my head. I’d come out of the carriage to think about something other than Katherine!

‘My lord?’ A guardsman close at hand.

‘It’s nothing,’ I said.

‘My lord, Captain Harran asks for you at the head of the column.’

‘Oh.’ An exchanged glance with Makin and we picked up the pace to pass those ahead, already slowing.

In the west the sun started to edge beneath the cloud bank to tinge the floodwater crimson. We reached Harran after five minutes of mud and splatter. A small town lay ahead on a rise, an island for now.

‘Gottering.’ Harran nodded to the distant houses.

Marten and Kent joined us.

‘Is the road impassable?’ I asked, the route dipped beneath the flood before rising again just as it entered Gottering.

‘It shouldn’t be too deep,’ Harran said. He leaned forward and touched his horse’s leg to indicate the level.

‘What then?’ I asked.

Marten drew his sword, a slow action, and pointed to the fencing on our left. I had thought it the normal detritus that a flood will wad into any fence or decorate the bushes with, but a closer look told a different story.

‘Rags?’

‘Clothes,’ Harran said.

Kent slipped from his horse and squelched a few steps forward along the road. Bending he retrieved a handful of mud. He held a grimy palm up to me.

I’d noted the white specks but not really paid attention. Inches from my face I could see them for what they were. Teeth. People’s teeth, long-rooted and bloody.

The waters burned red now with the sun drowning in the west. The air held a chill already.

‘And does this mean anything to you, Harran?’

‘The guard travel many places. I’ve heard stories.’ An old scar beneath his eye burned very white. I’d not noticed it before. Harran wore his years this evening. ‘Best get that bishop of yours here. He may have more to tell.’

And so, minutes later, Makin returned with Gomst behind him in the saddle. And Kent who had gone to escort the bishop, not for safety but because of the piety that got burned into him at the Haunt, returned with Katherine.

‘You could have let the princess have your horse, Sir Kent. I’m sure she didn’t want to cuddle up to a crispy bloodhound like yourself.’

‘I wouldn’t let him wade after us in the mud.’ Katherine leaned around Kent’s shoulder and shot me a venomous look.

‘You showed Bishop Gomst your evidence then, Kent?’ I ignored Katherine. I could feel her daring me to say she should have stayed where she was.

Makin let Gomst down on the verge where the ground rose to the ridge along which the fence ran.

‘This is a bad thing.’ Gomst staggered and almost slipped over on the wet grass before he reached the dark shrouding of rags. His hand kept questing for the support of his crook, left back atop Holland’s carriage. ‘Like St Anstals … I had a report.’ He patted his robes in search, then abandoned the effort. ‘And the ruin of Tropez.’ Wild eyes found me. ‘The Dead King’s work has been done here. Ghouls and rag-a-mauls if we’re lucky.’

‘And if we’re not so blessed, old man?’

‘Lichkin. There might be a lichkin.’ He couldn’t keep the terror from his voice.

Harran nodded. ‘The monsters from the Isles.’

‘Mother Ursula saw in visions that the lichkin would cross the waters. A dark tide would bear them.’ Gomst hugged himself against the cold. ‘They say that the lichkin have only one mercy.’

‘What mercy is that, your grace?’ Kent rasped.

‘In the end they let you die.’

I looked over at the black shapes of Gottering, roofs, a church tower, chimneys, a tavern’s weather vane. It pays to choose your ground and I would rather choose the town than a thin strip of mud amid a vast lake. But had the enemy already chosen Gottering, already laid their traps? Or was too much being read into some rags and a scattering of teeth.

‘Count them,’ I said.

‘My lord?’ Harran frowned at me.

‘How many teeth, how much clothing? Did three peasants brawl here and bring the Gilden Guard to a halt, or is this the scene of a massacre?’

Harran waved at two of his men and they climbed down to inspect more closely.

I nudged Brath closer to the captain. ‘If it’s corpses we’re to fight, best to do it with our feet dry and space to see them coming. How deep is the water around us? I’d say two feet? Three? Not drowning deep? Even if the dead crawled through it a man might mark the ripples in their wake?’

‘Deeper in places,’ Harran said. Another captain disagreed. Harran and two more guard captains, Rosson and Devers, started to argue the lie of the land.

Marten rode through a gap in the fence, down into the flood. He stood in his stirrups to face us in the gloom, the water lapping his toes. ‘It’s about this deep, sire.’

‘Dozens,’ said the man checking the fence, peeling the garments from it. ‘Scores maybe.’

‘We’ll stay here,’ I said. ‘And ride into Gottering with first light.’

I accompanied Katherine and Gomst back to the carriage. ‘I’ll sleep in here tonight,’ I told Miana as she opened the door. ‘I want a sword close to you.’

‘I’ll marshal the guard around the carriage,’ Makin said from the saddle.

‘Put Kent on the roof. Rike and Gorgoth by the doors. Let Marten organize patrols through the fields. Better a drowned guardsman or two than being taken by surprise.’

Cold woke me in the night. Even with Miana pressed against me beneath a bearskin throw, and with Katherine’s weight through the thickness of her own furs, the cold opened my eyes. The faint slosh of horses moving through the standing waters became a fractured sound, a brittle tinkling and a creaking. Ice.

I leaned toward the nearer window, across Katherine, and found her watching me. In the dark her eyes made a gleam without colour. She drew aside the window cover and together we squinted through the perforations of the grille, the steam of our breath mixing.

The screams started faint and grew no louder, but with each passing minute the horror mounted. Screams reaching across the skin of ice, all the way from the dark shapes of Gottering. I knew it for pain. Terror has a different quality and pain will scare away fear quick enough.

‘I should go out.’

‘Stay,’ she said.

So I did.

Katherine sat up, straight-backed against the cushioned rest. ‘Something’s coming.’ I reached for my sword — she shook her head. ‘Coming a different way.’

For a moment, before she closed her eyes, I swear I saw them: green, grass-green, lit from within. She sat still, ice-still, painted in black and pale by moonlight through the window grille. I thought her perfect and need trembled in me. Screams I had heard before.

She sat without motion as the long night marched past, her lips twitching with an occasional word, muttered and indistinct. Miana and the old men slept, uneasy in their dreams but not tormented, and I watched Katherine, listening to the distant howling, to the crackle of ice, and to the drawing of her breath.