Emperor of Thorns

27

Five years earlier

I lay a long time in the dark, gripped by fever. I lay in the dust beside the fresh corpse of a thousand-year-old man and from time to time, when my mind grew clear enough to understand the slurred demands of my leathery tongue, I drank.

Without light and without sound, dreams cannot be told from delirium. I talked to myself — mutters and accusations — and sometimes to Fexler, face-down, the back of his head a wet mess of soft and sharp. I held his gun — my totem against terrors in the night. In the other hand I clutched the thorn-patterned box, refusing the urge to open it even in the madness of fever.

I spoke to my demons, addressing each with long and dreary monologues as I twisted in the dust. Lesha’s head watched me from the alcove where the pills had been, her skin luminous, blood oozing black from the stump of her neck. Sunny came eyeless to stand vigil, the words from his seared tongue as incoherent as mine. William came hand in hand with mother, her eyes worried, his hard as stones.

‘I tried to save you.’ Same old story — no new excuses from Jorgy.

He shook his head, blood and curls. We both knew thorns would not have held him.

The dead of Gelleth came to stand watch, and my brothers from the mire, collected by Chella just for me.

And in time Fexler’s medicines worked their slow magic, my fever broke, and dreams faded into darkness, William’s eyes the last to go, hanging like an accusation.

‘I’m hungry.’ The bones of my spine grated as I sat up.

I didn’t know how long I’d lain there — long enough for Fexler to smell the wrong kind of sweet. But even that didn’t stop the growling of my stomach.

I made a meal of the hardtack in my pack, finding it with blind fingers and chewing in the dark, spitting out the occasional inedibles fished out by mistake. I looted Fexler without squandering my light, a fingertip search discovering and exploring his many pockets. In one hand I held my blunted knife ready, not trusting his cold and stiff corpse to suffer my attentions without protest. He lay quiet, though. Perhaps the Builders had the means to defend their halls from such influences just as the seals the mind-sworn place on royal tombs hold their charges safe. I found a lightweight rectangular box, like a card case, with heavy, rattling contents, elsewhere several flexible cards that felt like plasteek, tubes that might have been writing instruments in his breast pocket. All of them went into my pack.

At last, when I felt ready to move, I relit my flask-and-wick lamp.

Getting into the shaft proved every bit the nightmare I had imagined it. Climbing up to a point at which I could snag the rope proved worse. Missing the rope, falling, and having to repeat the process nearly ended my tale with a dusty skeleton at the bottom of a deep, dry hole.

When I heaved myself out into the noonday sun, bloody-handed, panting, too dry to sweat, Balky and the stallion were waiting where I left them, offering the same looks they had seen me off with. The stallion had flecks of white foam on his muzzle and both carried the signs of dehydration, sunken flesh and an unhealthy glitter to the eyes. I stood before them, bent over with exhaustion, heaving in my breath, eyes screwed tight against the brightness of the day. I wondered if the Builder-ghosts felt this way when they came out into one world from another. Did they have to struggle from the deep places of their strange existence to emerge like Fexler did, painted by machines for human eyes? Those old ghosts watched me as I straightened, as one hand lifted to shield my gaze. I sensed their attention. As blank and unreadable as the mule’s and surely more alien.

The last of the water from the skins on the stallion’s back did little more than take the edge from our thirst when split three ways. I would have taken it all of course had I not thought we could all three make it out and back to the Bad Dogs’ barrels.

The Bad Dogs’ camp held few signs of its former masters. A split bone here and there, the weapons, tatters of cloth, scraps of armour, all filmed over with dust. I stayed long enough to take one of Toltech’s bitter pills and fill my water-skins.

I took a look through the view-ring before I left. Part of me wanted to see Fexler there, to tell him how much his freedom had cost, to see if he cared. The ring showed nothing, just the world through a hoop of silver-steel. As I took it away the view flicked to the one seen from the lower slopes of paradise, nations laid out in browns and greens, without regard for the boundaries on men’s maps, the oceans swirled about in deepest blue. And there, on the coast to the south, on the thin arm of sea that divides our lands from Afrique … a red dot, burning.

‘I’m not your toy, Fexler. You can’t set me chasing across empire to join your little dots.’

Balky snorted, as if wondering whether I’d gone mad in the heat. I put the ring away. ‘Dammit.’ I’d been planning a journey to that exact spot.

‘King Honorous Jorg Ancrath.’ The flunky with little rod for rapping doors afforded me the introduction he omitted on my first visit.

The provost sat in her ebony chair as if she had remained there since I left, seated the whole time with her ledgers and tallies, amid the geometric splendour of her Moorish halls. The writing desk beside her lay empty, the scribe perhaps dismissed while the provost checked his work. She watched me cross the floor with sufficient interest to pause her quill-scratching.

‘Sanity prevailed, King Jorg?’ she asked. ‘You turned back before the Hills? When I sent Lesha to guide you I had hope that it would be her scars that showed you the way — back through the city gates.’

‘Your granddaughter was both a caution and an inspiration, Provost.’ I came to the step of her dais and offered a deeper bow than she merited. I carried bad news after all. ‘She was an explorer. Our world needs more like her.’

‘Was?’ The old woman didn’t miss much. I felt rather than heard the tensing of the two men at the door.

‘Outlaws attacked our camp while we slept. Perros Viciosos.’

‘Oh.’ That made her old, those two words. Years that had only toughened now for a moment hung their weight upon her head. ‘Better to have found the fire a second time.’

‘Lesha died in the struggle before we were taken, Provost. My man, Greyson, was not so lucky. His was a hard death.’

And yet you survived. She didn’t say it. The Hundred and their spawn have an instinct for survival and it never pays to ask the cost.

The provost sat back in her chair and set her quill on the armrest. A moment later she let her papers fall. ‘I have sixteen grandchildren you know, Jorg?’

I nodded. It didn’t seem the time to say ‘fifteen’.

‘All bright and wonderful children who ran through these halls at one time or other, shrieking, laughing, full of life. A trickle of them at first, then a tide. And their mothers would put them on my lap, always the mothers, and we’d sit and goggle, young to old, a mystery to each other. Then life would sweep them on their way, and now I could more quickly tell you the names of the sixteen district water marshals than of those children. Many I wouldn’t recognize in the street unless you told me to watch out for one.

‘Lesha was a bold girl. Not pretty, but clever and fierce. She could have done my job maybe, but she was never meant for city life. I’m sorry now that I didn’t get to know her better. More sorry for her father, who knew her even less well perhaps but will weep for her where all I have are excuses.’

‘I liked her. The same force pushed us both. I liked Greyson too,’ I said.

It struck me that finding someone I might call a friend had been a rare thing in my life. And in the space of three short months I’d discovered and lost two.

‘I hope whatever you found proves worth the sacrifice.’

The gun hung heavy at my hip, wrapped in leather. Almost as heavy as the copper box on the hip opposite. The provost took up her quill again. No talk now of receptions, feasts with merchants, mass with the cardinal. Perhaps she first wanted to tell her son that his daughter was dead.

‘A man who can’t make sacrifices has lost before he starts, Provost. There was a time when I could spend the lives of those around me without care. Now, sometimes, I care. Sometimes it hurts.’ I thought for a moment of the Nuban falling away after I shot him. ‘But that doesn’t mean that I can’t and won’t sacrifice absolutely anything rather than allow it to be used to rule me, rather than have it be made into a way to lose.’

‘Well now, there’s an attitude that will serve you well at Congression, King Jorg.’ The provost offered me a grim smile, tight in the creases of her face.

‘Your granddaughter though was not something I gave up to advance my cause. I did my best to save her from pain.’

The provost took a scroll and dipped her quill. ‘These Perros will face justice soon enough.’ She shot me a cold look. ‘These road-brothers. This order will send enough of the city guard to hang them all.’

‘They’re all dead, I believe. Perhaps one or two escaped.’ I remembered flinging the hatchet, the man’s arms thrown up as he fell, the second runner vanishing over the rise. ‘One.’ I wanted to go back and hunt him down myself. With effort I unclenched my jaw and met the provost’s gaze.

‘We know of the Perros Viciosos in Albaseat, King Jorg. Tales are brought through our gates, many tales.’

‘Well, let them add that to Lesha’s own story. At the last she brought an end to the Bad Dogs and saved many others from their predations. And I was the end she brought them.’ I thought perhaps Lesha might have approved of that.

The provost shook her head, just a fraction, telling me her disbelief without words. ‘It can’t be that there are less than scores in that band, not with the trouble they have caused, the atrocities …’

‘Two dozen, a few more perhaps.’ I shrugged. ‘It doesn’t take many hands or much imagination to build a reputation on blood and horror.’

‘Two dozen — and yet you killed all but one?’ The provost arched a brow and set her quill down again as if unwilling to record a falsehood.

‘Dear lady, I killed them from youngest child to oldest woman, and when I was done I blunted three axes dismembering their corpses. I am Jorg of Ancrath — I burned ten thousand in Gelleth and didn’t think it too many.’

I gave her my bow and turned to leave. The men at the door, wide and gleaming in the black scales of their armour, stepped aside sharply.