Emperor of Thorns

24

We came into Gottering at first light. The water sloshed around the carriage floor at the deepest point and brought the smell of the river to us, but we didn’t have to get out.

I climbed from the carriage in the town square, with the flood trickling down the step behind me. The place showed no signs of damage, a pleasant enough town in the most prosperous region of Attar. Bunting from the harvest festival still hung across the main street from rooftop to rooftop. A child’s hoop beside the carriage wheels. Birdsong.

‘Did it seem to the patrols that the screams came from town?’ I asked.

Harran nodded. ‘Couldn’t be more than an hour since they stopped.’

A sniff of the air spoke of rot and shit, cold against the sinuses, what you expect from any town. And something else.

‘Blood,’ I said. ‘There’s slaughter been done here. I can smell it.’

‘Search the houses.’ Harran waved his men on. Dozens of them set off, ducking through doorways, the dawn light gleaming on their mail.

The first of the guard re-emerged within minutes. He held some kind of garment out before him, a pale and wrinkled thing, his face, almost as pale, kept stiff in a mask of revulsion.

‘Here!’ I called the man to me and put my hands out to inspect his prize.

He placed it in my arms without waiting for further invitation.

Even with it draped across my forearms, with the weight of it, the raw scent, and the faintly obscene warmth still clinging there, it took several moments before I understood what I held. It took an effort not to flinch and drop the thing in that instant of realization. I lifted it up, let the arms hang, the scalp flop.

‘It takes some skill to flay a man so completely,’ I said. I scanned the company, meeting the gaze of each soldier. ‘Terror is a weapon, gentlemen, and our enemy understands its use. Let’s be sure that we also understand this game.’

I let the skin drop to the cobbles. A wet sound. ‘Find them all. Pile them here.’

I rode the empty streets with Red Kent and Makin, circling the town at the water’s edge, finding nothing. By the time the sun cleared the rooftops Harran’s men had made a heap of one hundred and ninety skins, taken from cellars, bedrooms, stables, chairs before hearths, all across town. Each of a piece with just the three slices that a practised huntsman would use to take the hide from a deer. Men, women, young and old, children’s skins lay there, all faces wrinkled now. I picked up the hoop toy from by the carriage and fretted it through my fingers as the guard built the pile.

Marten escorted Miana and Katherine from the carriage into the Red Fox Inn, Gottering’s only such establishment. Miana waddled, her belly impossibly large, discomfort written across her face. Marten saw them installed in cushioned chairs and kept their company while they waited, with a fire lit and guardsmen about them, Gorgoth at the door. Outside, Gomst read a benediction over the remains in the square. I trusted Katherine to maintain whatever wall she had erected to keep the lichkin out of our heads, but she would have to sleep eventually.

‘We should move on,’ Harran said, pulling his white mare to Brath’s side. ‘This is not our concern.’

‘It’s true. The Duke of Attar would not thank us for policing his lands on his behalf.’

Harran pushed the gratitude from his face so fast many would have missed it.

‘Prepare to move out!’ he shouted.

I would have been happy to ride on as well — but it felt like being pushed.

Through the small leaded panes of the inn window, stained a faint green by the Attar glass, I saw Marten start to his feet and take Miana’s hand with concern.

‘However,’ I said. ‘Are you not expecting other guard troops to come this way? The flooding narrows the options for travelling from the west. How many of the Hundred are to follow in our wake?’

‘There may be some.’ Honour wouldn’t let him lie. A problem that never troubled me.

‘And aren’t the guard bound to the whole task, to getting the Hundred to Vyene, not just to those in their immediate charge?’

Harran stood in his stirrups. ‘Strike that! I want the victims found. I want each house secured.’ With a growl he rode off to oversee.

‘Whoever has still to travel this way is unlikely to be voting in your favour at Congression.’ Osser Gant levered himself from the shadows of stable block, his gaunt frame supported on a silver-topped cane, a nice piece of work in the shape of a fox’s head.

‘So why am I reminding Harran of a duty he would rather have forgotten?’ I asked.

Osser nodded. ‘And risking yourself.’

‘You’ve spent a lifetime on the edge of those stinking marshes, Gant. How many lichkin have you seen?’

‘An old man like me doesn’t stray far from his master’s hall, King Jorg. But you won’t meet many men who’ve seen a lichkin. You might find the corpse of a man who has seen one, and that corpse might try to kill you, but the man will be long gone.’ Osser nodded, as if agreeing with himself.

‘Not a one in all these years?’ I asked.

‘The lichkin may be old,’ Osser said. ‘I don’t know. But they’re new to the Ken Marshes. They’ve roamed there for ten years at most. Maybe not much more than five years. Even in the Isles they are a new plague.’

Marten came to the inn’s door and beckoned to me. Something important. Sometimes you just know. I swung out of my saddle and stepped down. Walking after an age in the saddle puts an unfamiliar edge on something you do every day of your life — just for a moment as your leg muscles remember how they were made. I opted for a slow crossing of the square. Something told me it might be a short walk but it was taking me a long way.

Marten leaned in close. ‘I think it’s her time. Sarah was like this.’

‘She can’t wait?’ I said. ‘Hold it in?’

‘It doesn’t work like that, Jorg.’ The flickered hint of a smile.

‘Hell.’ I raised my voice. ‘I want more guards around this inn. Secure all the exits.’

I peered through a glass pane. Miana had stretched back in her chair, Katherine in close, blocking my view. I didn’t want to go in. There was a time when I was pleased to find that something still scared me. As the years stacked up I kept finding new things to worry over. Pleasure turning to dismay. It seems men have far more to fear than boys.

I went back to Osser. Makin finished tending his horse and came across with Kent to join us.

‘And how many lichkin are there, Chancellor Gant?’ I asked.

‘I heard tell there were seven in all the world,’ Kent said, his gaze flicking to the bishop praying before the mounded skins. ‘Seven is too many.’

‘There may be seven,’ Osser said. ‘The bishop has a list of seven names written by the sisters of the Helskian Order.’

‘I thought the Pope called for all the seers to be killed. She said the nunneries weren’t built to shelter witches.’ The decree had stuck with me — an example of the lengths to which the Vatican would go in order to avoid unwelcome facts.

‘Her Holiness called for the sisters of Helsk to be blinded,’ said Father Gomst, having finished or abandoned his prayers. ‘And they were blinded. But their visions continue.’

A glance toward the inn’s window revealed little but Marten staring out. Katherine moved across the room with a steaming bowl and a cloth over one arm, becoming lost behind Marten’s broad shoulders.

Rike returned to the main square, a black oak coffer under one arm overflowing with silverware and fine silk. A few of the guards stationed at the entry points gave him disapproving stares but none went as far as to challenge him. Gold armour or not, I would be surprised if any professional soldier would turn down a choice piece of loot when searching Gottering. Even so, something was wrong with the picture. I pursed my lips and frowned.

‘Brother Rike.’ He walked over, sullen despite his takings.

I reached out and plucked at the silk, a lustrous orange I’d not encountered before. ‘What is it with you and fabric, Rike? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you leave a burning building without a bolt of stolen cloth. Something you’re not telling us?’ The idea of Rike in a dress painted as nasty a picture as the heaped skins. But that wasn’t the problem. The answer struck me. ‘You can carry more than that.’ When did I last see Rike stop looting before the weight of his takings made it impossible to gather any more?

Rike shrugged and spat, colour coming to his face. ‘I’d had enough.’

‘You never have enough, Brother Rike.’

‘It’s the eyes.’ He spat again and started to tie the coffer to his horse. ‘I don’t mind the fingers — but the eyes don’t look dead.’

‘What eyes?’

‘Every house.’ He shook his head and fastened another strap. ‘In the drawer with the knives and forks, on a shelf in the cupboard, behind the jars in the larder, everywhere you go to hunt out something worth taking. I don’t like them.’ He tightened the last strap.

‘Eyeballs?’ Makin asked.

Rike nodded and I shivered despite myself. No doubt they were removed as neatly as the skins. I think the precision of it unnerved me. I’ve seen a raven pluck a ripe eyeball from a head black with decay and kept right on eating my own meal. But something in the lichkin’s neat slicing felt unnatural. I shook it off.

Marten came from the inn, banished by Katherine. A moment’s hesitation took me. Could Katherine be trusted alone with my child when she held me responsible for her nephew’s death? Might she have saved Miana from the assassin’s knife just for the chance to twist the life from my infant son? I threw the thought away. Revenge is my art, not hers.

Martin stopped beside Rike and me, ignoring us both, staring at the heap of skins, some lost question leaving his mouth open.

I shrugged. ‘Men are made of meat. Lichkin like to play with the pieces. I’ve seen worse in a fleshmonger’s shop. Hell, I’ve seen worse when men take against their captives.’ That last bit was a lie, but the truth was that it wasn’t conscience that stopped men short of the lichkins’ excesses — men just weren’t such accomplished butchers.

I watched Rike rather than Marten. Nothing natural put the fear into Rike. Some things might set him running, but he’d be angry as hell while he ran and planning his revenge all the way. The last time I’d seen him run in terror had been from the ghosts on the lichway. Fingers and eyeballs stashed away in peasant houses wouldn’t do it. I’d seen him take both, and he hadn’t much cared if the former owners had finished using them.

My gaze returned to the skin heap. Something in my imagination kept making it seem to crawl. ‘Burn that,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if it’s needed any more.’

I went to the inn. Time to step through that door.

‘Damnation! Jorg where the fuck have you been?’ Miana snarled that ‘Jorg’ past small white teeth. I always said she had a pretty face and a foul mouth. And they say even the most proper of maids can swear like a sailor when labouring over a child. What words would she find when it came to push and shove? Strange to say that we’re born to our mothers’ cursing but ever after they think the young have tender ears and can hear only what might be said in church. I closed the door behind me, leaving it just an inch or two ajar.

Inside the inn smelled of wood smoke, hot and close, and older less pleasant taints, perhaps of murders done here before the sun rose.

‘Sweet Jesus!’ Miana gasped and spat, clutching herself. She lay back in a great armchair heaped with cushions. Sweat beaded skin, tendons straining in her neck. ‘I don’t want my baby here. Not here.’ Katherine glanced at me across the swell of Miana’s breasts. On the walls brown smears where skinless bodies had touched rough timbers.

I hadn’t wanted my child born on the road. It’s a hard enough place to live, and not a fit place to enter the world, not even with a gilded carriage and an honour guard decorated just as richly. And this village of the dead bore even worse omens. I thought of Degran small, frail, broken in my hands. The lichkin held Gottering in its hands — waiting — and Miana was ready to deliver.

Gorgoth turned from the doorway of the inn, taking more wood for the pyre in the square. A thick log in each hand, lifted from those racked against the wall. Guardsmen had joined in, tearing shutters from windows, breaking up an abandoned cart. Others came from the inn’s cellar with flasks of brandy and urns of lamp oil to quicken the flames. I pulled the door open and followed Gorgoth.

‘Get back in here, you whore-born bastard!’

I closed the door on Miana, watched by the Gilden Guard to either side. Eyebrows raised.

‘The queen is not herself,’ I said.

Six golden-helmed heads snapped back front and centre as I passed between them.

The lichkin held the town, held us all, though many of our number didn’t yet know it. Perhaps a little fire might loosen its grip and cleanse the air. Gottering was a spell now, an enchantment, a single great rune set out in pieces of men. Blood-magic.

When the timbers lay doused and heaped around the pile of flayed skins I drew Gog from his scabbard. The blade gleamed in the winter sun so’s you could imagine flames dancing on its edge. I set it to the wood. ‘Burn,’ I said. And flames really did dance on that keen line.

The blaze took fast, leaping amongst the broken wood, devouring the oil and spirits, sinking hot teeth into timber. Almost at once the meaty tang of burned flesh reached out, stronger than the smoke. Memory took me to the Haunt, walking out between scorched corpses to meet Egan of Arrow. And just a moment later, another memory, the shrieks of those the fire had left alive. Only — not memory.

‘What?’ I tilted my head to locate the sound. A high keening.

Captain Harran broke into the square on horseback. ‘It’s from that copse, on the ridge to the west. Hollow Wood.’

As we came into Gottering there had been another island in the flooded fields, three hundred yards to the west, a few acres of tangled woodland.

The lichkins’ mercy, Gomst had said, is that in the end they let you die.

But not yet.

The people of Gottering still lived. They still felt it. Somewhere in that wood close on two hundred townsfolk, flayed, without fingers or eyes or teeth, howled as I burned their skins.

‘Jorg!’ A shout edged with scream. Katherine at the doorway, pale, framed by auburn curls.

I ran, sword in hand. I pushed past her.

‘It- It got stronger. I couldn’t stop it,’ Katherine said behind me.

Miana lay before the fireplace and the crackling logs on bedding from the inn rooms, skirts hitched around her hips in many layers. Pain had twisted her limbs. The firelight shone on skin stretched too tight across her womb. White against that red flesh, set over my hidden child, the print of a three-fingered hand.

‘Miana?’ I stepped close, slamming Gog back into his scabbard. ‘Miana?’ A cold touch flickered across my chest. Perhaps that same three-fingered hand, reaching in. I have no truck with poets and their flowered words but in that moment my heart truly froze, turning to a heavy and clenched wound to see her there — a physical pain that staggered me. A weakness the lichkin infected me with, no doubt.

‘Miana?’ The eyes she turned my way did not know me.

I swung around for the door, almost knocking Katherine down.

‘You’re leaving?’

‘Yes.’

‘She needs you.’ Anger. Disappointment. ‘Here.’

‘The lichkin is reaching for both her and my son,’ I said. ‘And wherever this lichkin is it is not here.’

I left her, left Miana, left the inn. I hastened past the pyre where skins bubbled and melted, fats running and steaming over the flagstones.

With the brothers at my heels I ran to the corner by the bakers’ kilns, to a step that offered a view west across bright waters toward the bare trees where my enemy waited. I paused, willing my limbs to stillness, letting heartbeats count out time — time for judgment and clarity to catch me up. Moments passed with nothing but the distant howling and the black reflection of branches reaching out toward Gottering.

‘Surfaces and reflections, Makin,’ I said. ‘Worlds divided by such thin barriers, unseen, unknowably deep.’

‘Your pardon, sire?’ Makin took sanctuary in formality rather than try to follow me.

Every fibre of me screamed for action. My wife lay marked and tormented, a stranger to me, a prison for my son. My son!

My father would tell me, ‘find a new wife’. Nail the pair, mother and babe, to the floor with one sword thrust and ride on. Let the lichkin choke on that. And I would do it too, if no better choice remained. I would do it. I told myself I would do it.

I held still, just a tremble in my fingers. ‘Consider the problem in hand, Lord Makin. The good bishop tells me there are at least seven lichkin, maybe more. And we know they’re striking across Attar for the first time. Maybe they’re attacking along other routes into Vyene? Spread thin? It seems that if there were many and they were confident of victory over soldiers rather than peasants, they would have come to us last night. That or they’re toying with us, cat to mouse.

‘Well I would rather find out about a new enemy by first encountering one on their own, so this is a chance not to miss, rather than a horror to run from,’ I said.

It wanted us to run. All this — all this was about fear. It wanted Miana bundled into a carriage and half a thousand guardsmen to gallop off along the road to Honth.

‘And if it’s the cat toying with the mouse?’ Makin asked.

I smiled. ‘What better chance will the mouse ever have to kill the cat?’

I drew Gog and the fire that burst out along the sword made pale all flame that had ever burned there before. I set off toward the black trees and the weakening screams of Gottering, wading through dark waters with the brothers treading in my wake. And I walked rather than ran, though a fire burned in me near as fierce as that on my blade, because surfaces divide known from unknown, and though I might walk where angels fear to tread, I try not to rush in like a fool.