Emperor of Thorns

31

Sleep became a rare commodity after the arrival of our newest travelling companion. Day by day Gottering fell further behind us. On the fifth day, Captain Harran declared we would push on through the night to reach Honth by dawn. On that long and rumbling journey a moment of quiet visited and exhaustion dragged me down quicker than the mud of Cantanlona. Jolted by rutted miles, the occupants of Holland’s carriage exchanged partners periodically. I rolled open a sleep-burred eye at one such bump to see Osser Gant’s grey head cradled in the bishop’s lap. Another lurch took my head from Miana’s shoulder, another still put Katherine’s head on mine.

In the darkness of my dreaming Katherine’s skin burned against me, but we shared nothing save warmth. When she lifted me from my quiet nightmare of thorns and rain she gave no warning.

‘Katherine?’ I knew her touch. Perhaps my show and tell of childish woe hadn’t scared her from my dreams as well as hoped. Perhaps like me she merely thought how stupid I had been to let old Bishop Murillo capture me in the first place. I have the church to thank for teaching me that last lesson in reading the signs, in seeing the trap rise around you, in never lowering your guard. A lesson that has served me well.

‘Katherine?’

A dark hall. I moved through bars of moonlight behind shuttered windows. My head turned for me, my fingers trailed the wall without asking permission. Familiar. All of it familiar, the hall, the smell of the place, the roughness of the wall, and of course, the being trapped in another’s head. Steps down, a long and winding stair.

‘This is like that night at the Haunt — when the Pope’s man came calling,’ I said, though no lips moved to speak my words.

The end of the stair. I turned a corner. Familiar, but not the Haunt. More steps down. My hand — his hand — took an oil lamp from its niche.

‘Katherine!’ I made my silent voice louder, more demanding.

‘Ssh! You’ll wake him, you idiot.’ Her voice seemed to come from a deep place.

‘Wake who?’

‘Robart Hool of course! Your spy back at the Tall Castle.’

A door. Hool’s fingers on the black iron of its handle.

‘If he’s my spy why are you using him?’ Espionage was never my forte but I had been rather proud of having a man so high in the king’s guard on my payroll. Until now.

‘Sageous opened him up to true-dreams,’ Katherine said from her well. ‘He sleepwalks and the castle guard know not to wake him or there can be trouble. He’s good with a sword. I use him so I can watch over Sareth when I’m not there.’

‘And now-’

‘Ssh!’

‘But-’

‘Shut. Up.’

Hool moved through the doorway and along a corridor, shadows swinging around him. We came to the Short Bridge, a yard of mahogany crossing over the recess from which a steel door could be summoned to seal the vaults. He crossed over and started down the steps beyond.

It grew colder. We were no longer in the keep of the Tall Castle but below it in a long Builder-made corridor that leads by zigs and zags through the upper vaults to an ancient annex excavated by the dear departed House of Or. Built to house their dead. Less ancient than the castle itself of course, but having the decency to wear its years more openly. In the tomb-vault the walls ran with cracks and in places the stone facings had fallen to reveal rough-hewn rock scarred by pick marks.

Hool’s feet slapped bare on cold stone, his nightclothes thin comfort against the subterranean chill, but his scabbard bumped against his legs, a better kind of comfort altogether. Sleepwalking or no, a swordsman always buckles on his blade. Makin taught him well, back in the days of wooden swords in the courtyard. I hope he’d learned the lesson I taught him too, that afternoon in the duelling square when I stepped outside the rules of the game and felled him with a punch to the throat.

Hool’s footsteps echoed and his breath steamed before him. When the Ancraths displaced the Ors my ancestors were quick to empty the mausoleum, turning out each sepulchre ready for fresher occupants. And in time we started to fill the place. The old statues were replaced, or sometimes just altered. With creditable economy and lack of sentiment my great-grandfather had the masons chip the moustache from the founder of the Or dynasty, reshape his nose a little, and stand over my great-great-grandfather’s corpse in passable representation of the man.

If Katherine used Hool to watch over Sareth, why were we in the tomb vault? Unless of course Sareth had died? What did Katherine want to show me? Another death to stain my hands? Or was she leading me to the place where she had me dragged on the day I returned from Gelleth, where she took me to keep my father from finishing what he started? Reminding me of the life I owed her? He would have cut my heart out if that had been required to stop it from beating, I know that much. Were we returning to Mother’s tomb?

The image of a sunlit surface woke in me. A surface high above me. The pressure of cold water. And floating from those depths came a memory that seemed less real now in the Tall Castle, in the house of the Ancrath dead, than it had in the mists of Gottering. My father was dead? I hadn’t spoken of it to anyone. Katherine had shown me ghosts were made of dreams. The lichkin could have lied to me — she must have been lying to me. That old man was too mean to die. Especially a soft death in the comfort of a bed. Was that where we were going? Had we come for that? To see him in his tomb?

We turned a corner to see a light vanishing around the next turn thirty yards ahead. I caught a glimpse of two men at the rear of the party before the corner took them. Something wrong about them — something familiar. The air held a sour reek.

People heading to the tombs. To where Mother and William lay beneath marble lids. Behind enchanted seals.

Hool sped up, no urgency in his movement, just a quicker pace, Katherine’s touch light enough not to wake him, firm enough for acceleration. At the next turn we had clear view of the last three figures. Each a thing of sunken flesh, stained dark, not by sun but by mire, hair lank and patched, hanging down across black rags. They carried pipes and darts. Mire-ghouls.

How would such creatures have penetrated the castle? Why hadn’t Katherine raised the alarm when she had the chance?

Another turn, the end of the Builder corridors, entering the decaying works of Or now.

Why hadn’t Katherine raised the alarm? Because that would wake Hool up and she’d lose her eyes in Ancrath, she wouldn’t know the reasons. And after all, reasons can be worth their weight in gold. Fexler had sent me to his tomb to put a proper end to his remains, to bring him into his full strength. The dead were not so different. Necromancers returned them to their flesh or bones to find their strength once more. But what drew them here?

Dust hushed Hool’s footsteps now. Unlike every other cellar in Crath City, mouldering and dank, some magic in the Builder foundations kept the vaults dry as bones. A parched and whispering place like the dry-lands where souls fall.

The oldest of my relatives lay furthest back, great-great-grandfather, great-grandfather, grandfather, wives, brothers, sisters, also lesser-born Ancraths who were, despite the cardinal sin of their birth, great champions. A horde of them, all but forgotten. Statued relics staring into dark infinity above old bones. But the glow came from a closer set of steps leading to a chamber better known to me.

Robart Hool’s fingers closed around the hilt of his sword.

‘Don’t! He’ll wake up!’ Katherine’s voice, in my ear or in his, I couldn’t tell.

The sword whispered from its sheath, a decent blade from the forge of Samath down by the Bridge of Change, runed for sharpness. Ahead of us the ghouls would be entering Mother’s tomb.

‘I won’t let him.’ Quite how I would stop Hool waking wasn’t something that concerned me. Perhaps just wanting it enough would make it happen in this world the Builders had left us. Though whatever Fexler said it seemed that wanting seldom made it so.

Katherine had set Hool striding — I made him sprint, whipping his sword in a figure eight to get a sense of its weight and balance. I don’t know quite how I worked his strings. It’s possible Katherine took pity on me and lent her strength, but I’ve found that when my blood kin are threatened, even when they’re dead already, my will takes on an edge.

When you’ve committed yourself to violence it takes an almost inhuman effort to stop short. It’s one of those things that once you’ve started need to be finished, rather like coitus, interrupting that’s a sin, even the priests say so. I stopped though, and Robart Hool didn’t wake. Charging in would likely provide a fresh corpse for the ghouls, and whatever friends might be accompanying them, to play with. But to raise the alarm might take us too far away, take too long, and let the invaders escape with whatever prize they came for.

Instead I ran Hool back up the corridor, up the steps, to the Short Bridge. He reached it breathing more heavily but not winded. In wall recesses to either side of the bridge lay silver panels with smooth silver buttons. Some combination of the buttons would raise the door, an implacable slab of Builder steel from which a thousand swords might be forged — one of the Ancrath treasures.

I’d never seen the door raised. No one had ever told me which buttons to push.

‘Father never dreamed the combination for you I suppose?’ I asked.

Katherine didn’t reply but Hool shuddered for her. I wondered if Father’s dreams were too dark for her to tread.

‘Fuck it.’

I drove Hool’s blade through the panel. The door slammed up with such speed that one of the balanced planks hadn’t time to fall away. It became splinters. Along the corridor behind me glow-bulbs flickered on in several places, creating islands of reddish light. In some distant place a siren started up, sounding for all the world like the voice of the Connath watchtower, though I doubted three strong men had taken to the winding handle of some similar device. This voice came more crisp, more clear, the work of a more ancient machine. Where the running and the stabbing and the crashing of steel doors had failed, this distant wailing started to undo my grip on Hool, peeling my fingers back one at a time, lifting him from sleep as if he were a diver in some dark sea now struggling for the shimmer of the surface. I pressed him down again, the action pushing me toward that surface, at once both close and far away. The sounds of the carriage started to leak into my ears, the creak of the frame, rumble of wheels, Gomst’s snores.

‘No.’

Hool and I ran back, bare feet slapping, following the turns as if remembering a waking dream that is slipping through your grasp even as you seize it.

Close now. One more corner.

Darts came hissing out of the darkness. One struck the oil lamp and glanced away. The other sunk into Hool’s chest, the thick pectoral muscle on the left. A small red circle grew around the black shaft of it.

Keep running. Keep dreaming.

Hool proved to be too fast on his feet and the line of sight too short for a second volley. He threw the lamp and raced after it rather than run while splashing oil with each step. The lamp shattered against the wall where the corridor turned, the bloom of fire silhouetting two ghouls, lurking at the corner, quick fingers pushing new darts into their blowpipes. He reached them as they drew breath for their shots. The swing of his sword destroyed both pipes. They moved swift and sure, these creatures, different from the dead men Chella set walking, corrupt but alive, once men perhaps but shaped by the poisons of the promised lands.

Both leapt for us, and Hool’s next slash opened one in the air, shoulder to hip, pale grey guts slopping out in a welter of black blood. The other bore him to the ground, talons in his shoulders, grey teeth filed to points snapping before his face. With the sword trapped between us and the ghoul Hool could do little but roll and push. The creature hadn’t much weight to it, maybe half of what a grown man might weigh, but its wiry limbs held a fearsome strength. Its breath stank of graves, and those teeth straining so hard to close on flesh put a horror in me even though it wasn’t my face it wanted to eat off the bone.

Desperation lent Hool the brute force needed to win free. He lifted himself off the ghoul using the sword between them as a bar. Its talons raked his shoulders, the blood spattering down across its chest. Panting and cursing Hool pinned the ghoul with his knees and turned the blade to skewer it through the neck.

He cast around, wild, lost. It occurred to me that despite the blood spilling down our chest, soaking scarlet into our nightshirt, I felt no pain.

‘Jorg! Wake up!’ Katherine’s voice in my ear, the warmth of her breath on my neck, the rumble of the carriage behind her.

No.

Hool turned to follow on.

No.

I pushed the image of the dart into his eyes, hanging to him by fingertips.

He reached to pull it free. The thing held tight, tenting his flesh around it as he tugged. Just a thorn! One sharp yank, rip it out barbs and all, let it bleed clean. And he did.

‘God damn it!’ He spat blood, looked around again. ‘Where the hell?’ I felt his lips move, felt Katherine shaking me half a thousand miles away.

Images from his dream got him moving again. Things he’d seen with his own sleeping eyes. The door sealing the vaults, a third ghoul, maybe more entering the Ancrath tombs. I fed him my anger too, burning against the numbness that would be tingling in his fingers by now.

Not so far ahead, the sound of a hammer striking iron, again and again.

Somehow I hung on as he ran, leaving the dying glow of the broken lamp behind us. A hard left into darkness and ahead of us, in the stolen burial chambers of the House of Or, another glow. Slower now. Slow, up the steps to Mother’s tomb, the intruders’ light catching gleams from Hool’s blade, still slick with the black blood of ghouls.

And there in the light of a single lantern, a third ghoul and three dead men, their stained flesh marked with the scale tattoos of Brettan sailors, all of them watching the fifth of their party, a pale man, black-cloaked, black-cowled, kneeling by the smaller of the two sarcophagi, chipping with hammer and chisel at the runes set around its lid.

To his credit Hool made no challenge or battle-cry. He moved in behind them without hesitation, lined up his swing, and carved halfway through the ghoul’s head. Even as Hool attacked I wondered at the dead men watching. The minds of such things are filled with the worst of what once lived there, and idle curiosity is not a sin, at least not one dark enough to return to a corpse. And yet they watched the tomb, avid, careless. Hool wrenched his blade free and hacked the head from the first of the dead men before the other two turned. Not a perfect swing, but he had some skill, did Master Hool and while his sword kept its fine-honed edge it would forgive him his minor errors.

The dead men came at him, faster than I had hoped. Released from their fascination with my brother’s tomb they proved a different proposition from the shambling dead more often encountered. Hool chopped the arm from one, taking it at the elbow. The dead man caught Hool’s sword arm in its remaining hand, and the second threw itself at his legs.

As Hool went down, the necromancer rose.

I may not have counted Robart Hool high in my esteem, but he died well. He took the sword from his trapped arm and rammed it left-handed through the neck of the corpse man falling to cover him.

Pinned by the one-armed corpse, grappled at the legs with the other dead man biting flesh from his thigh, Robart roared and fought to rise. The necromancer came in fast and touched cold fingers to the wrist of the hand straining to free the sword. All the fight left Robart. Not the pain, not the horror of the dead man’s teeth chewing at the tendon high on his thigh, but the fight. I knew what a necromancer’s touch could do.

The dead sailor kneeled then stood, its grin crimson, blood dripping from its chin. The eyes that watched us weren’t the eyes it first saw us with. Something looked through them. The necromancer kneeled, paler now, more pale than I thought a man could be.

‘My lord,’ he said, not lifting his gaze from the flagstones. ‘My king.’

‘My lord!’ Gomst’s shrill voice.

‘My king!’ Osser Gant.

‘Wake up you fool boy!’ A sharp slap and I found myself looking into Katherine’s eyes.

‘Damn you all!’ Miana said, and the baby started howling.