Emperor of Thorns

46

Five years earlier

‘Who the hell are you?’ I pushed myself from Elin and left her leaning back against the wall, still patting down her skirts.

‘A man who sees the future.’ The intruder, a priest by the look of his robes, watched us with milky eyes. For the sake of Elin’s honour I hoped he saw as little as the cataracts suggested.

‘So you already know I’m just about to repeat my question?’ I said.

‘I am Father Merrin, priest of the Free Church of Adam.’

‘You’re to marry my brother to his Hagenfast wife,’ Elin said, pulling on her top, remarkably unashamed of herself, rather pleased if anything.

‘Yes,’ Father Merrin said.

Something niggled at me, something familiar about a man looking into the years to come. I scratched my head as if that would aid matters. It didn’t.

‘Can we help you?’ I kept an eye out for Sindri and his uncle appearing at the door. They’d kept busy touring the other rooms. Elin said Sindri knew her mind. I’d hoped he approved — she had said he would. I did stop Ferrakind stirring their volcanoes up, after all. ‘Is there something you need?’ I asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ Father Merrin said. The lamplight from the main hall glistened off his baldness and made something comic of his ears, too big, like those of all old men. ‘I came to help you instead, King Jorg.’

‘How so?’ Something about the man tickled at me. I doubted that he would be walking through the Gilden Gate to conduct the ceremony. He’d choose a different entrance. It seemed unlikely the Gate would let him through any more than it would admit me.

‘You’re wanting to search beneath the throne, Jorg. Something to do with a ring you’re carrying. But you can’t see how to do it. Hemmet isn’t going to allow you on the dais. You’ve thought about distractions you could make. Each plan more wild and less promising than the last. You even thought of causing some scandal with my lady here and trying to achieve your goal in the uproar.’

‘All true,’ I said. Elin punched me in the shoulder. Hard. ‘And why do you want to help me do that? What’s going to happen when I use the ring?’

Father Merrin shrugged. It made him look young, just a boy wearing all those creases. ‘I don’t see so much with these blind eyes, only a glimpse or two. All I know is that somehow it will make the Lord Commander owe you a favour.’

‘And why is that good for you?’ I asked.

‘That too is dim and far away,’ he said. ‘But Lord Commander Hemmet’s support, the surety that his favour builds, will tip you in some decision made years from now. And that decision will help the Free Church, and what helps the Free Church weakens Roma and helps the people.’

‘Helps the people?’ I drew the view-ring from inside the jerkin Sindri had gifted me and spun it before Elin’s eyes. ‘Oh well. If I really must.’

I motioned for the priest to lead on. ‘Lead on,’ I said, remembering he was blind.

Sindri, his uncle and bannerman, had rejoined the Lord Commander and Captain Kosson before the throne.

Sindri called out to us as we approached. ‘Did you find us a good room, Jorg?’

‘Well, I liked it.’ We both grinned, naughty boys in the schoolroom. Neither of us married quite yet — growing up could wait a while.

‘Lord Commander,’ Father Merrin said, his voice carrying the sing-song of prayer. ‘It is necessary that the throne be set aside for a short while.’

Hemmet scowled, as if the thought of it being touched, let alone moved, distressed him. ‘You’re sure, Father? Is it one of your visions?’

Father Merrin nodded. Bald-headed, skinny in his robes, big ears like handles, I found it hard to take him seriously, but he held sway with the Lord Commander. Hemmet clapped his hands and four guards came trotting in from a distant entrance.

‘Move the throne … there.’ He watched them take hold of it. ‘Be careful. Show respect.’

‘And the rug,’ Father Merrin said.

The Lord Commander raised his brows still further at that, but waved his men on. Two of them rolled back the heavy weave, a work of intricate patterns picked in silk, thick, and glistening with iridescence like a butterfly wing.

A copper plate, round, a hand span across, lay set into the floor at the point where the throne sat. I stepped forward to climb the dais. All about me the guards straightened, stiffened, ready to intervene.

‘Allow this, Hemmet,’ Father Merrin said without heat.

The Lord Commander drew a great breath and sighed it out. He waved me on with a dismissive gesture as Merrin had known he would. The future-sworn must be hell to live with.

I kept the view-ring hidden in my hand and knelt beside the metal plate. No handle or hinge, no keyhole. I recalled the door at the mathema tower and just held the ring against the copper, dead centre under my palm. A moment of warmth and a Builder-ghost sprang up above me. I snatched my hand back. Drawn in pale shades as all the others, this ghost seemed familiar. Not Fexler, or Michael, but …

‘Custodian!’ Lord Commander Hemmet fell to his knees. The guards around him followed his lead.

The Custodian stood wordless for a moment. He flickered, frowned, slid back a foot from the copper disk, maybe two. A faint buzz of vibration from the ring and there stood Fexler. The ghosts locked eyes, furrowed brows in concentration or fury, locked hands … and vanished.

‘Extraordinary!’ Lord Commander Hemmet pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. ‘What happened? There were two saints? Were they fight-’

All the lights came on. Every Builder light woke at the same moment so that the dome above our head sparkled like starry heavens. The light dazzled so that you had squint against it, and made the flames of the oil lamps invisible as if we stood outside in high summer.

‘The lights …’ said Norv the Raw, as if we might not have noticed.

Before any further statements of the obvious could be made doors of gleaming steel started to slide down from recesses above every entrance save the Gilden Gate. The action accompanied by a squealing noise that set my teeth on edge, the sound of nails down Lundist’s chalkboard.

‘The doors …’ said Norv. I resisted the temptation to beat him around the head.

It took maybe a count of ten for the doors to seal themselves, metal to stone, and without pause they began to retreat at the same rate. Guards came pouring through as the doors lifted, summoned by the squeal of the mechanism. For some minutes men of the guard rushed this way and that, set on diverse missions by the Lord Commander to establish that no attack was taking place, to see what other changes may have been wrought, to calm the servants, to set at ease the minds of other guard units, and the like.

All that frenzy came to a dead halt when they brought the Custodian in, the real man whose data-ghost we’d seen in the moment before Fexler wrestled him away again. He came in escorted by four men of the guard, with more crowding behind, discipline lost, curious children trailing a stranger in the market. Fexler had broken the Custodian’s stasis.

‘Well there’s a thing,’ I said. To Sindri’s party the Builder was a stranger in strange clothes carrying a stick crested with a mass of short red ribbons. They would have to be sharp to recognize him from the brief look at his ghost on the dais. To the guards, however, a legend walked among them. To Lord Commander Hemmet a saint approached, his revered ancestor and a part of the foundation of his authority. Hemmet raised a hand and the chatter died. ‘Welcome, Custodian! Welcome!’ A broad grin on his face.

The Custodian looked bewildered and perhaps fearful, but he had been asleep for a thousand years I supposed, so I allowed him that.

A pause, and then he spoke. But what language I couldn’t say. A harsh tongue, guttural, it seemed to sit on the edge of understanding. I caught one word that sounded like ‘alert’: he said it more than once.

‘Perhaps he speaks another language,’ I said. ‘I read that there were many tongues among the Builders, almost as many across the empire as there are kingdoms. And even if he speaks the empire tongue it may be that it has changed over the course of centuries. Things move on, nothing stands still, words least of all.’

Hemmet scowled at me but the anger didn’t last, a cloud across the sun. ‘You did this, you woke him up, brought the light back to the palace. And I won’t forget it, King Jorg.’ He set a hand to the Builder’s shoulder, then moved beside him, the arm around him, protective. ‘I will speak with the Custodian in private. Captain Kosson, afford our guests all possible courtesy and escort them from the palace when their needs have been met.’

And Hemmet left us, taking his saint with him.

I bent and scooped up the view-ring. ‘Well Father Merrin, you were right. Hemmet loves me now.’ I frowned. ‘I thought someone once told me … I thought I heard that you couldn’t tell a man his future because telling him changes it.’

Merrin smiled and turned those milky eyes on me. ‘It depends on the future, Jorg, and how much you tell them. My own visions are so hazy that there’s little detail to relate.’

‘So what else can you tell me about my future, Father?’ I stepped closer so what sight remained to him might capture me.

‘You don’t want to know, Jorg,’ he said. ‘The future is a dark place. We all die there.’

‘Tell me anyway.’

And, perhaps because he knew I would wear him down — that future being plain to both of us — he answered, ‘You will kill and kill again, do the darkest deeds, betray those you should love, destroy your brother, and lead ruin to us all.’

‘So, no real change then?’ I ignored the look on Elin’s face, on Sindri’s. Disappointment put an edge on my tongue. I had thought I might grow, might be better, might be more. ‘Tell me, Father.’ And here I used ‘Father’ as though I meant it. ‘Why doesn’t every man of consequence find himself a future-sworn seer and plan a path to glory?’

A stillness came over the man. The type of regret that cannot be manufactured. He spoke with a gentle, self-deprecating humour but I knew he spoke true. ‘To look into what will be isn’t unlike self-abuse. To watch yourself march through possibilities, to follow the truth through all those twists and turns. Just a little might stunt your growth.’ I thought of Jane, tiny and older than Gorgoth. ‘Or make you go blind.’ His cataracts seemed opalescent in the Builder light. ‘And if you look too far, if you look to see what waits for us all at the end …’

‘Tell me.’

Father Merrin shook his head. ‘It burns.’

And for an instant I glimpsed a skinless hand holding a copper box.