Emperor of Thorns

30

Five years earlier

Marco stood beside his trunk, stiff, uncomfortable in his frock coat.

‘Is there a law says you can’t take that off?’ I grinned and took hold of his half-ton trunk.

‘Your breastplate must chafe in this heat, Sir Jorg?’

I had strapped it back on as we came into port. Not something to go overboard in, but worth suffering ashore.

‘The blacks will stop a dagger thrust?’ I asked.

‘Tradition will stop anyone from trying,’ Marco said.

The banking clan privileges hadn’t meant much to me as a road-brother but certainly in the courts of the Hundred and in the corridors of Vyene they were afforded protections above that of kings.

‘Let’s find us some transport.’ I nodded down the largest of the alleys leading from the plaza. All the streets in Kutta looked to be narrow, hemmed in by tall buildings to manufacture shade. A tight fit for wagons, but the serious cargos would be unloaded further down the coast at Tanjer, a larger and more commercial port.

Marco followed me, keeping his distance as if spurning my protection and putting me firmly into the role of porter. Perhaps he was safer than I. Men everywhere knew that to strike down a modern was to open an account with the clans, and that gold would spill from Florentine coffers until the debt had been paid, the ledgers balanced. In a broken empire though, the promise of eventual death on an assassin’s blade proved less protection than the bankers might have hoped when set against the certainty of immediate gold. Perhaps in less wild and more honourable lands the moderns’ traditions offered more surety. Certainly the Moors held merchants in high esteem and kept better order than we did in the lands closer to Vyene.

Dragging that trunk in search of stables, my decision to leave Brath safe in the care of a Port Albus farrier seemed more foolish by the yard. By the time we reached what I was looking for the curses were spitting from me, sweat dripping, arms burning. It appeared to be a stable of sorts. Camels lounged around a covered water-trough, mangy beasts with clumped collars of moulting fur and cracked skin around their knees. I’d met a camel before, long ago in Dr Taproot’s circus. A surly creature, ungainly and given to spitting. These looked no better.

‘Wait there.’ I stood Marco out of sight.

I knocked at a door of bleached and fractured planks, answered in time by an old man with one milky eye. In the shadows behind him I heard the snort and clomp of horses.

‘As-salamu alaykum.’ I wished peace upon the old thief. All horse-traders are thieves. ‘Two mounts and a pack-mule.’ I held up three fingers and in the other hand a gold florin stamped with grandfather’s face, and I finished with, ‘Insha’allah.’ Thereby exhausting all the local phrases I’d learned from Yusuf on our crossing.

He watched me with his good eye, running fingers over his chin, white stubble, skin the colour of java and milk. A shadow fell across us, a man on camelback. I glanced at him, a warrior riding high on the saddled hump, all black wrappings, just the flash of eyes in the slit of his shesh. He moved on.

‘Two horses,’ I repeated.

The old trader spouted gibberish at me and waved his hand in negation. He knew what I wanted, nobody with something to sell in Kutta lacks the rudiments of empire tongue required to conduct a sale.

‘Two!’ I added a second coin and rubbed them between finger and thumb.

It hurt him to do it but he shook his head and stamped off muttering. The door shuddered closed.

‘They really don’t want you getting to Hamada, Marco.’

I crossed over to him. He scowled each time I said his name, flinching at some breach of manners, some over-familiarity. ‘Marco,’ I said, leaning close enough to smell the sourness of him, ‘it’s a long walk. Have you no friends in Kutta?’

‘No,’ he said.

I wondered if he had any friends anywhere. Heading off across the desert to Hamada with him, horses or no horses, seemed a fool’s errand. Someone with influence, quite possibly Ibn Fayed himself, did not want Marco to get there. Moreover, at least three mathmagicians appeared to have anticipated my arrival, which meant that Ibn Fayed knew my intentions. The only sensible course of action was to turn around and sail for Port Albus. Except that such a move would be encompassed in the calculations carried out long before my arrival by Yusuf, Qalasadi and others. To behave as predicted would only draw me deeper into their net. Perhaps into an arrest at the docks, or an accident at sea — arranged for my return trip whilst I had been playing the game of twelve lines and sipping tea. Coming here in the first place had been a misjudgment — in truth an arrogance, a child’s conceit.

‘So what would you have me do, Marco?’ Abandoning him to his fate seemed the most sensible choice. But the die had told me to make a new friend, and sensible choices were predictable choices, which this far into the net would like as not get me killed.

‘I’ll need a room.’

‘That I can do.’

I went alone, collared a street urchin and let a copper coin lead us both to a guesthouse. The heavy and ancient door the boy took me to looked unpromising, sitting alone in a wide blank wall. When I knocked, a woman glared at us through the grille. A crone, older than the bleached wood and rusted nails she hauled open. Too wrinkled and bent to need a veil to keep her modest she cast a disapproving eye over me and led on in. The interior surprised me. A short corridor led to an inner courtyard where lemon trees grew in the shade of balconies rising four storeys on each side. Enamelled tiles decorated all surfaces, blue and white, geometrically patterned. An illusion of coolness, if not actual coolness.

I took two rooms, paid in coppers from half a dozen nations, and went to fetch Marco. He had waited where the crone couldn’t see him through the grille and I let her complaints, the sharp and the guttural, run off me as I hauled his trunk through, the modern following in my wake.

‘It’s too small,’ Marco said. Sweat ran off him in rivers but it didn’t seem to bother him. I’d yet to see him drink. I wondered if soon he’d start to shrivel. Something about him called to the death-magic in me, to the necromancer’s heart. It tingled at my fingertips.

‘Too small for what?’ I collapsed onto the trunk. Dragging it up two flights of stairs had half-killed me.

Marco scowled. I had expected bankers, especially travelling bankers, to be closer to diplomats, masters of their own demeanour, but this one made no effort to hide his distaste for me. Perhaps he hoarded his charm along with his gold, for I’d yet to see so much as a glint of either.

‘You owe me for the room, and the guide, banker.’

‘Guide? A child in rags led you off.’

‘A child that I paid,’ I said, still flat out on the trunk.

‘I am keeping tally, Sir Jorg. Now, if you will afford me some privacy …’

I levered myself up and went to my room where I collapsed again. I lay with closed eyes imagining the sharp winds over the icy shoulders of Halradra. In six months I had crossed half the empire. And like Goldilocks with her bears and porridge, I’d found parts too hot and parts too cold. And for the first time I wanted to be back in the Highlands, back where it felt just right. For the first time I thought of my kingdom as home.

When you stare at the cracked blankness of a ceiling your mind will wander. Mine made a list. A list of reasons that brought me here. A list of the answers I would give to that question. None of them sufficient on their own but together a compelling force that had driven me into this foolishness. Orrin of Arrow had sent me, with his talk of oceans and distant lands. Perhaps I thought that with broad horizons of my own I could capture some of whatever magic he held. Fexler Brews had sent me with his little red light, now blinking over the caliphate of Liba. Curiosity had led me into the Iberico and tied me to the Bad Dogs’ torture pole. It would be fair to say curiosity had its hooks in me. Short of opening a certain box curiosity could get me to do most things. Qalasadi had sent me with his treachery. Ibn Fayed with his threat. Grandfather when he judged me worth saving and told me not to go. In the end perhaps, though I called it vengeance, it was not this time the need to strike back that drove me but the need to defend. I had a family.

Long ago my mother had charged me to look after William, to keep my little brother safe. And though I have failed many duties since, that was the first of my failures and the one that bit deepest — deeper than the thorns whose scars record the event. Like Marco I had ledgers to balance, and though this duty was a poor substitute, I would see it through. I had a family once more. That old man in his castle by the sea. The old woman who loved him and who had loved my mother. My uncle, soldier though he was. And no thorns to hold me back. A threat hung over them and this time nothing, man or monster or ghost, would keep me from saving them.

Clarity of vision is a thing much prized. I find when you turn that clear sight upon yourself — and see through to the truth behind your own actions — it might be better to be blind. For the bliss of ignorance I would tell myself that only vengeance drew me, as it did of old, when choice lay black and white like pieces on a board, and life was a simpler game.

The heat, the immediate quiet, and the faint sounds that distance made familiar — smoothed of their alien edges — all conspired to lull me to sleep. A buzzing brought me to my senses, reaching for the knife at my hip. Something on my chest? I slapped a hand to the hot metal of my breastplate. The buzz again, as if a huge fly had crawled beneath the armour and become trapped.

Cramped fingers found the buzzing thing between iron, cloth, and sweating flesh. I fished it out. The Builders’ view-ring! I took the thong that held it from around my neck and let the ring make slow revolutions. It buzzed once more, tiny vibrations seen only as a blurring of the surface. I held it to my eye and at once the whole of the wall between my room and Marco’s became over-written with pulsing red light.

‘Curious.’

I moved to the wall and set my ear to it. The sounds of a conversation reached me, too indistinct to make out the words or even the language. Outside my window the balcony overlooking the lemon trees served all the rooms. I slipped out and edged to Marco’s window. He had the shutters closed.

Any in the courtyard below who chose to look up, or any guest on their balcony, would see me. However, the banking clan seemed less popular than genital warts in Kutta so I thought it unlikely that anyone would complain about my spying. In fact the lack of attention I was getting made me sure that they were all busy spying on me.

I set an eye to the shutter slats. I shouldn’t have been able to see much, looking from the brightness of the day into the gloom of a shuttered room. The Builder ghost glowed with its own light though, described in whites from bone to magnolia, and so I had no trouble seeing it, or in seeing Marco, cast into pasty relief by the pale illumination.

Spying is well and good, but in general I don’t have the patience for it, and what patience I do have is soon lost when it gets hot. I dug my fingers between the slats and wrenched the shutters open. The catch came free and skittered across the floor, fetching up against the polished leather of Marco’s shoe. I stepped in and closed the shutter behind me.

‘So sorry.’ I sketched the faintest of bows. ‘But I really wanted to see what you were up to.’

The modern staggered back, his face twisted halfway between murder and terror.

The trunk lay open at the centre of the room, the bed set on end and leaning against the door to make space. Inside, the sharkskin exterior gave over to metal, plasteek, and muted patterns of light beneath glass that reminded me of the hidden panel at the weapon vaults beneath Mount Honas.

‘Ah, the aberration.’ This Builder ghost spoke with none of Fexler’s warmth, dropping each word stillborn. He looked younger, maybe thirty, maybe forty, hard to tell in a picture drawn from shades of pale. His clothes too were different, many layers, close-tailored, buttons along the front, a breast pocket.

‘Aberration? I like that. I’ve been called many things, but you’re the first to use “aberration”. And what should I call you, ghost?’

‘Kill him!’ Marco hissed, his hat held to his chest like a talisman.

‘Well that’s no way to treat a friend.’ I gave Marco my smile, the one with edges, then looked to the data ghost. ‘Instead of that why don’t you tell me how it is that you need Marco here to drag you halfway across Maroc when you should be able to look out of a thousand hidden eyes, step out of all manner of hidden doors in scores of nations? And what do you want with Ibn Fayed?’

‘You may call me Michael.’ The ghost grinned, a smile selected from one of thousands stolen from the Michael made of flesh, a man now centuries old dust. A real smile but somehow wrong, as if sewn into position on a dead man’s face. ‘And I need to be carried because Ibn Fayed has a new faith — one that bids him seek out any trace of the Builders and erase it. Which of course answers your question about my business with him, Jorg.’

‘Well and good then. I too have business with the man. It’s just the getting there that is proving problematic. Perhaps you have some wonder of the ancients that will fly us all there like birds?’

Marco snorted, managing contempt. But the Builders had flown. I knew it from my father’s library.

‘Well?’ I asked. If this turn of events lay within the mathmagicians’ calculations then I may as well have admitted defeat — but given that I didn’t think it did fall within their plotting, I found renewed interest in crossing the desert to the court of Ibn Fayed with my two new friends.

‘I can do better than that, Jorg of Ancrath,’ Michael said. ‘We can go by ship.’