Emperor of Thorns

26

Chella’s Story

The carriage jolted across frost-stiffened mud and Chella cursed again. On the bench opposite, Kai looked far more comfortable, on the edge of sleep almost, as if bounced in his nurse’s arms. She clutched the armrest, fingers white on the leather. Five years starved of necromancy, five years since the Ancrath boy had drained her, shrivelled up her power in the firestorm of his ghosts. She had thought the Dead King merely cruel to punish her so, to leave her stranded once more on the shores of life, plagued by the everyday aches and pains of flesh, mocked by trivialities like temperature. Now she appreciated his cunning too.

‘Damnation.’ Chella hugged her furs close about her. ‘Who made the autumn so chill?’

‘Who decided to hold Congression on the edge of winter?’ Kai asked. ‘That’s the more reasonable question.’

Chella felt cold, not reasonable. Kai’s easy manner irked her. She returned often now to the day the mire-ghouls had dragged him and the girl to her through the reeds. Mud and slime in their hair, horror frozen into their fresh young faces. Each display of his returning confidence, each hint of the mild contempt that hid behind his smile, made her regret deciding to use him the more. Better he had died with his pert little strumpet.

Necromancy at its heart is a guilty pleasure, a surrender to the darkest instinct. The fact that Golden Boy had picked up his old self-assurance again, his charm and his winning smile, as if he just dabbled in a secret vice, a necessary evil, dug at her moment to moment. That he proved so good at it made her want to claw the face off him. He seemed to think it something he could set aside when no longer required, like he had that girl. What was her name? Sula? She wondered if Kai could still remember it.

Necromancy has to cost you. It had certainly cost Chella. Jorg might have taken a bite for free, but all he got was a taste. Golden Boy on the other hand had picked it up as though it were nothing but juggling, and had yet to drop a ball.

‘I hate being alive,’ Chella spoke to the passing world through the carriage grille, hedgerows edged with hoarfrost so thick that every twig bristled with thorns of ice.

‘And yet we hang to it so dear,’ Kai said. ‘Sometimes by fingertips.’

He had walked the dry lands now. Thought he knew it all. Thought he knew both sides of the coin from his stumbling in the borders where newly dead sometimes lost their way. Chella wondered how the deep voyaging would change him. What it would be that took the ease from his smile. Somewhere past Absolution, in the places where angels fear to tread, maybe even across the black sands to the caves where lichkin dwell. It waited for him out there — and on the day of his dark epiphany she would forgive him his slights and his superiority for they would be broken things that no longer held use for him. Until that day, though … one more cheerful encouragement and she would take his face.

The roll and rock of the carriage made her stomach jump. Her bones ached so it hurt to sit. And the cold, the damp, insidious cold! She wiped her nose, leaving a glistening trail across the back of her hand, then sniffed, noting and pretending to ignore Kai’s look of faint disgust.

We play with corpses and my mucus offends him!

Being so alive made her petty and weak.

The carriage rolled to a halt, the coachman banging three times on the roof.

Kai looked up. ‘Trouble?’

Chella sensed nothing but in her diminished state that meant little. She shrugged, leaned forward, and opened the carriage door.

Axtis stood in the mud, his golden armour bright in the winter sun, hurting her eyes. More of the Gilden Guard pressed around him on horseback. ‘Smoke rising over the town ahead.’

‘Which town?’ Chella squinted. Leaving the carriage didn’t appeal, the sun promised warmth, but it lied.

‘Gottering.’

‘Never heard of it. Send riders ahead and drive on.’ She leaned back into the carriage and closed the door. ‘Two hundred and fifty men! Worried over smoke. If the place was one big bonfire we could ride through.’

‘Perhaps our friends have been here before us.’ Kai caught the mist of his breath and shaped it into a question mark, fading between them. Old tricks.

‘Lichkin are no one’s friends, Wind-sworn. You’d do well to remember that.’

The carriage juddered into motion again and before long rolled on into smooth mud and tinkling ice crusts.

‘The road is flooded — we’re fording.’ Kai, head back against the rests, eyes closed. ‘There’s a pyre of sorts in the town square. No bones.’

Kai had told her his wind-sight grew hand in hand with his dead-sight. She hated him the more for it. His eyeballs twitched beneath his eyelids, looking ahead of them, seeing what she could not. Still, she allowed herself a smile. There were things ahead that Kai would not see coming, however far his vision rode the wind. The Dead King’s cunning had set them on this path. Two necromancers sent to Congression. The necromancy necessary to his purpose, and just as necessary the fact that they stood close enough to life to pass as untainted, Kai too new to his calling to raise alarm, and she too distant from her old power to seem a threat.

Dark waters seeped around the door join as they went, the carriage half-floating now. Then, as it seemed they would sink, the wheels found the road once more and they jolted back onto dry land. Chella caught the stink of roast meat.

‘It’s a funeral pyre.’

‘There are no bones,’ Kai said. ‘And the festival flags are out. A celebration maybe?’

Chella knew death. She shook her head.

Stepping from the carriage she jumped to the ground before it came to a halt.

‘What is it?’ Kai dropped down behind her.

Chella raised a hand to silence him, not that she listened with her ears, but it felt good to shut him up.

‘Screaming …’ she said. Horrible agony. Her skin burned with it. A hand rose before her face and for a moment she didn’t recognize it as hers, hanging on invisible thread, one long finger, bony in the knuckle, pointing. The questing hand settled, indicating the open waters between the town and a nearby copse. ‘There.’

‘I can barely sense it,’ Kai said.

‘It’s hiding.’ Chella brought her hands together before her, shaping her will. She might have only an echo of her power but she wielded what she held with lifetimes of experience. ‘Help me bring it out.’

Drawing forth dead things from behind the veil always put Chella in mind of the cesspit back in Jonholt. A hot summer and the stink rose between the boards, acrid, strong enough to make her eyes water that day, the day she dropped Nan Robtin’s brooch. Dropped was the wrong word. She had pinned it carefully to her smock, piercing coarse wool with the steel pin. And even so it fell, turning in the air, sparkling, making diamond fractures of the light, though it was only glass and mirror. She missed the brooch twice in the air, fingers brushing it, then fumbled it, sending it skittering across the boards and down the dung hole.

For the longest time Chella had stood and stared at the hole. The image of the sparkling brooch falling into darkness played across her vision. She hadn’t asked to take it. Nan would have said no. It’s borrowing if you bring it back, she had told herself.

‘Stealing if you don’t,’ she whispered, there by the cesspit behind the scrub lilacs.

She had lain flat upon the boards, nose wrinkled, breath held against the physical force of the stench. Cheek to the wood, arm reaching down, the stained boards scraping her bicep through her smock. Fingers found the filth, the coldness surprising, a crawling sensation of revulsion as she dipped in, stomach heaving, her hand enveloped now, wanting to make a fist and yet stretching out, questing.

The need to draw breath built in her chest, a hammering demand. Eyes screwed tight. Toes curled, legs drumming, hand questing. YOU WILL BREATHE. And in the end the body’s wants prove stronger than the mind’s and you always take the breath.

Chella had lain gagging, a thin spill of acid spew drooling from her panting mouth, and still her fingers hunted in a cold world, half-solid, half-liquid.

And after all that — the sudden bite of the brooch pin made her scream and whip her hand out, empty, splattering filth.

‘The trick,’ she muttered to Kai, ‘is to let it bite.’

When the bite came Kai fell shrieking, and Chella endured with grim satisfaction, hauling to bring out what was lost and hidden. Weak as she was, Chella used the life that filled her to tempt and anchor her prey. At the last, when her bones threatened to tear through flesh and skin if she did not release her hold, Chella pulled harder still and a mist began to coil about the surface of the flood. Frost patterns spread beneath the mist, racing in wild, angular profusion over dark water.

It rose in a splintering of ice, something both more white than the frost, blacker than the waters, a creature of bone-pale limbs cast with midnight shadow, blade-thin, hands dividing root-like into three fingers. And somehow, despite the lack of defining features, undeniably female. Mouthless, her pain scaled a different register, resonating in an ache deep in the sockets of Chella’s teeth. Men of the guard staggered around her, choking, tearing at their eyes.

‘Keres!’ Chella named the lichkin, sealing it back into the world.

‘What happened?’ Kai climbed to his feet, hauling in a breath. ‘I can see it. What’s changed?’

‘I-’ Something had changed, the lichkin lay revealed, stripped of its shroud of ghosts.

Kai clenched his jaw against the lichkin’s resonating agony.

The ghosts were gone — flayed away.

And in that moment Chella understood.

‘She’s been skinned.’