Emperor of Thorns

49

Chella’s Story

The towns and villages along the Danoob grew close together as Chella’s column approached Vyene. Soon they would join into one unbroken sprawl, washing up against the walls of the imperial city.

‘Stop!’

It irked that she had to shout her commands but the necromancy still festering in her had retreated too far for the dead to respond directly to her desire.

The cavalry came to an untidy halt. The horses didn’t take well to dead riders, even if they were the same riders they had carried on the previous night and for weeks before that. Some had refused, screaming and bucking when their dead owners tried to reclaim them. Chella had thought to cut their throats, but Kai convinced her to turn the animals free and send the spare riders back to join the Dead King’s advance.

‘Why have we stopped?’ Kai leaned in toward her, guiding his horse with both knees.

‘I need to ask Thantos a question,’ she said.

There’s a slope down toward evil, a gentle gradient that can be ignored at each step, unfelt. It’s not until you look back, see the distant heights where you once lived, that you understand your journey. Chella looked up from her depths in sudden epiphany. Such moments had punctuated her life, her half-life, drawn out over a hundred years and more. Not once had they given her more than brief pause. Not once had she stepped back.

‘Come,’ she told him, a touch of tenderness in her voice. It should have been enough to set him running.

They went together. Kai not wanting to, but pushing down his fear.

Chella set her hand to the carriage door. The metal handle made her skin dry, made it old. She pulled it open.

‘Now?’ she asked, speaking into the empty horror of the carriage.

And by way of answer a grey contagion flowed out. Kai screamed as it wrapped him. For an instant Chella glimpsed the lichkin, its slim bones insinuating themselves into Kai’s flesh, through clothing, past armour. It took a while. Too long. Ages. Kai’s choking screams drowned out all other sounds, his flesh writhing to accommodate its new occupant, until finally his jaw snapped shut and left her ears ringing.

Thantos turned Kai’s head to look at Chella, bones grating. He didn’t speak. The lichkin stood beyond words. Nothing that interested them could fit within such mean packages.

‘He’ll last. He’s strong,’ Chella said.

Thantos climbed back into the carriage. Even drugged, the team drawing the carriage were skittish. Two had died and been replaced. There was no possibility that a horse would bear him to the palace, not even now he was clothed in flesh.

‘Can you hear me in there, Kai?’ Something in the eyes said he might be listening now that his screams were silent screams. ‘Did you never wonder that we came with five votes but only two delegates? Could not the Dead King spare three more necromancers, or cleaner men bound to his cause? We came in a pair. One host, and one to guard the host, ready to move against him if he should anticipate his fate.’ Secrets are best kept behind a single pair of lips.

Thantos reached out and closed the door, an awkward motion within his stolen flesh.

‘But you never did anticipate.’ Chella spoke the words to the closed door and shook her head. ‘You should have learned to fly,’ she spat. To fault him made it easier.

Above the outlying spread of Vyenese houses, neat little homes with wooden shingles and log piles stacked to the eaves against the coming of winter, came the stink of burning. In many places hearth-smoke rose white from stone chimneys, but in others the smoke lifted in black and angry clouds. Horror stalked the streets, rose earth-covered from family graves, crept in from field and forest. The Dead King’s tide swept in from the west, true enough, from the Drowned Isles, through Ancrath and Gelleth, through Attar, Charland and the Reichs, but it also rose from the very ground, as if a dark ocean waited below the soil, fathoms deep, and now swelled from the depths at the Dead King’s call, lifting the fallen from their tombs.

At Vyene’s gates guard units in their golds thundered past in both directions. News came from west to east. Reinforcements, regular army units from Conquence in the main, made the march east to west. More Gilden Guard manned the gate than would be necessary even at Congression. Additional troops lined the walls, archers with an even mix of longbow and crossbow. They’d clearly had little experience if they thought arrows would stop the dead.

‘Hurry through, madam, you’re the last and we’re to seal the gates.’ The gate captain waved the column on, with no concern for any report from the captains of the escort, no demand that they explain their thinned number or ragged formation. Not even the lack of followers sparked his interest: perhaps he thought they had sought shelter along the way or hurried to arrive ahead of the guard.

Thantos’s carriage rumbled through without remark, though the men closest to it paled, despair soaking into them through their skins.

On through the broad streets of Vyene, onto the wideness of West Street beneath the Western Arch. The grandeur on all sides worked its own magic on Chella. For all her long life she had seen nothing close. Hers were the graveyards and the mire, the bones of forgotten men and the tombs erected to their memory. In the face of such works of men as these she knew herself dirty and small, a bone-picker, a thing of nightmare and of the dark.

‘The Dead King will make a necropolis here.’ It made her feel better to speak the words. Not that she wanted to live always amongst the returned — with life pulsing through her the thought made her stomach roil — but the sheer wonder of Vyene insulted her existence in ways beyond explanation and she would rather see it dust than endure the judgment of its empty windows.

Another contingent of guards passed them as they neared the end of West Street where it opened onto a vast square. Several hundred men, a thousand maybe, riding hard, with the Lord Commander at their head. The Dead King had mentioned Lord Commander Hemmet, spoken of the cloak and staff that would mark him out. A man to watch.

Riding to the palace it seemed that the dome would never grow closer, that its size went from incredible to impossible as they advanced. At one point, perhaps halfway between the distant mansions and the greatness of the palace, the flagstones lay stained with blood. Some effort had been taken to clean the area but the smell of slaughter is hard to disguise. A pulse of dark joy broke from the carriage, brief and then gone, but enough to set the horses pitching and jumping in fear. These deaths pleased the lichkin. A potential foe erased. The wind still carried fortune with it from the west.

Chella’s troop closed on their station, the last to be filled, just to the left of the Empire Gate. They turned from their allotted path only at the final moment, and rode at a walk into the grand entrance before the gate. The thin gold line of duty-guards fell into disarray, confused at their comrades from the road dismounting in the grand entrance. Before they had much to say about it the lichkin stepped from his carriage and all the men’s attention became drawn to him as a man will stare at the bloody stump where his thumb was before he cut it off.