Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3) Page 10

  I saw the abbot, waiting in the shadows of the wall, as we approached the altar. He had the look of an unwilling conscript gathering himself to draw steel and to fling himself into battle. The bishop in his finery shot Castel a vicious glance. Soft and fat he might be, but another life could have put the bishop amongst my road-brothers, red in tooth and claw. Another life would just have made Castel a different kind of victim to men such as Rike and Row and Liar.

  Three more monks until our turn. Two more. One. Orscar stepped up, thirsty for communion wine. The orphans normally got the body not the blood. And, quicker than I had thought he could, the abbot strode forward, swept the boy up, and bore him from the church. Orscar, made mute by surprise and by the speed of his abduction, didn’t manage even a yelp before the door to the chapterhouse swung shut behind them. Every other person in the great hall of the church held still, watching the door until the echoes of its closing died away. Murillo, already red in the face, shaded to purple. Another heartbeat of silence and then the bishop looked my way, furious for reasons I couldn’t fathom. He stamped the heel of his crook to the floor. The priest, silver thread tracing the scarf that draped the black velvet of his gown, fixed cold eyes upon me and held out the communion cup, almost empty now. I drank, and the wine was bitter.

  More monks, more filing past, more drinking, as we stood and waited. The wine still burned my tongue, as if they had fermented gall rather than grapes. A lethargy rose through me, from the cold stone of the floor, through leg and belly until my thoughts swam in it and the drone of liturgy lost its meaning. And finally, with the witching hour behind us, the bishop spoke those words all children long for in any mass.

  ‘Ite, missa est.’ You are dismissed.

  I staggered on the way to the door, catching at a monk’s arm for support. He shook me off, a stony look on his face, as if I were diseased. The church stretched and squashed, the walls and pillars dancing like reflections on a pond.

  ‘What?’ I tasted the bitterness again and my tongue ran out of words. My hands sought the knife that should have been on my belt. My hands knew the danger.

  ‘Jorg?’ I heard Arthur’s voice, saw him bundled away by the monk with the ticks and foul stinks.

  Somehow I came to the doors that led outside, and leaned on them. Cold night air would help. They gave, opening by degrees, and I slipped through. Strong arms wrapped me. One of Murillo’s men-at-arms. A black hood, taking away the world, throttling hands. I threw my head back and heard a nose break. And fell into a confusion without up or down, without sight, straining against bonds, and drowning, choking, retching in the dark.

  Memory gives me only pieces of the time spent in the bishop’s chambers, but those pieces are clear and razor-edged. I had never fought Katherine when she pulled me into nightmare. Now I fought her as she tried to leave. I fought her as I drew each part of those broken memories through the channel she had opened – like Brother Hendrick and his Conaught spear, I didn’t care if they tore me, so long as she felt some fraction of it too.

  The smell of Murillo, perfume and sweat. The corrupt softness of his bulk. The strength that twisted my limbs until they creaked, until the pain reached me through the fog of whatever drug the wine had hidden, and tore thin screams past the gag. I made Katherine watch and share, made her share the pollution, the crude stink of his lust, the delight he took in his power, the horror of being helpless. I let her hear his grunting. I made her understand how dirt can get inside you, too deep to be scrubbed out, too deep to be bled out, perhaps too deep even to be burned out. I showed her how that stain can spread, back across the years turning all a child’s memories to rot and filth, out across a future, taking all colour and direction.

  I kept her with me, lying soaked in blood and filth and pain, bound, blindfold, sick with the drug and yet clinging to it for fear of the clarity a clear head would bring.

  I won’t say rage kept me alive. Those poisoned hours offered no escape, nothing so tempting as dying, but perhaps if I could have slid away into death, if it had been an option, then my anger might have been the thing to keep me back. As the drug faded from me and focus returned, a need for revenge started to build, quickly eclipsing all minor desires such as escape, the easing of pain, or the need to breathe.

  Chains can hold a man. A well-fastened manacle will require the breaking of bones before the prisoner can win free. Ropes in general cannot be broken, but with determination they can often be slipped. Lubrication is the key. Sweat will normally start the process, but before long the skin will give and blood will help those rough fibres slide over raw flesh.

  The bishop didn’t wake. I made no noise while I freed my hands, tied behind my back. I eased from the bed, slithering across stained silk sheets. On the floor I took the fruit knife from the bedside table and by the glow of the dying fire sawed at the bonds around my ankles. I walked naked from the room. As if there could be more shame. I took the knife and the poker from the fire with me.

  In the small hours of night the monastery corridors lay empty. I walked them blind, trailing the point of the knife along the walls from time to time to count my way. I heard plainsong as I walked, though there were none awake to sing it. Even so, I heard plainsong, pure in its promise, as if all things holy and good were pressed into notes, and spilled from the mouths of angels. I hear it even now when I remember those orphan boys, the digging in that field, mud and potatoes, lessons and games. I hear it as if it were reaching faint through a closed door. And the song drew a tear from me, oh my brothers, not the hurt, or shame, not betrayal, or that last lost chance of redemption – just the beauty of that song. One tear on a hot slow roll down my cheek.

  I left by the door to the stables, unlatching it and turning the heavy iron ring. Both the soldiers on the other side turned, blinking away boredom. I felled them with two blows of the poker, first to the left temple of the right guard, then the right temple of the left. Whack, whack. They didn’t deserve to be called soldiers, defeated by a naked child. One lay silent, the other, Bilk I think, writhed and groaned. Him I skewered through the throat. That shut his noise. I left the poker in him.

  The stables smelled of every other stables. In the darkness, amongst the horses, I could have been anywhere. I moved without sound, listening to the clop of hooves, the restless snort and shudder of disturbed mounts, the scurry of rats. I took as much rope as I could carry and a sharper knife used for working leather. The coils itched my shoulder and back as I returned through the blind corridors.

  I left the rope outside the bishop’s door and went back for a bale of straw and the soldiers’ lamp. The big horses that pulled the Pope’s carriage were housed in the stall closest to the stable doors. The larger of the two stepped out when I opened the stall, head down, looking more asleep than awake. I set a tether around his thick neck and left him standing there. He looked as though he would stand forever, or at least until someone gave him reason to move again.

  I guessed Murillo’s men-at-arms would be billeted with Lord Ajah’s soldiers in the almonry for the night. At some point the monks would be on the move for the night prayer. I didn’t know when that might happen, nor truly care: I would just kill anyone in my way. The night still had a dream-like quality, perhaps the tail end of whatever poison Murillo had had the priest slip into the wine.

  The swinging lamp chased thin shadows across the walls, copies of my limbs. I wedged handfuls of straw beneath the roof eaves where I could reach by climbing on barrel or sill. I wedged more between the split wood, stacked for winter against the chapterhouse wall. There’s not much to burn in a stone-built monastery, but the roof is always the best bet. And of course the guest quarters where the bishop slept offered more combustibles, with several tapestries, wooden furniture, shuttered windows. I went into the priests’ rooms, two priests in the chamber to the left of the bishop’s and three opposite. I cut their throats as they slept, a hand to the mouth while I tugged the sharpness of the leather-knife through skin, flesh, cartilage an
d tendon, through vein, artery, and wind-pipe. Men sliced like that make strange noises, like wet bellows pumping, and thrash before they die, but in the tangle of their bed linens it isn’t loud. I set straw and bedding ready to fire in the priests’ rooms too.

  The high priest, the man who poisoned the cup, ready for Orscar, and drunk by me, I cut. I knew him to be dead but I cut his face and watched the flesh spring open beneath my blade. I sliced away his lips and let the ichor from his eyes, and I prayed, not to God but to whatever devil got to keep his soul, that he would carry the wounds with him into hell.

  By the time I returned to Murillo’s chambers I was clothed once more, in the scarlet of priests’ blood. For a time I watched his bulk within the bed, a black lump in the embers’ glow, and listened to the wheeze in and the snored breath out. He posed a puzzle. A strong man who might wake easily. I didn’t want to have to kill him. That would be too kind.

  In the end I lifted the covers with a gentle hand to expose his feet. I eased the rope beneath his ankles so a yard lay to one side and the rest to the other. A hangman’s noose is a simple knot, and I used the loop to draw his ankles together before making the knot tight against them. Then I left with the rope coil, playing it out as I went.

  On my route back to the stables I set flame to the various piles of straw and bedding prepared earlier. At the stables I cut the rope and tied the end around the plough-horse’s neck. Before I led him away my eye lit upon a fallen hemp bag that lay on the floor with long dark roofing nails spilling from it. I stooped to pick it up.

  Brother Gains, who Burlow set to watching the monastery, tells it that I came through the cemetery leading the biggest horse in the world and that all behind me the sky was lit with crimson and orange as fire leapt among the roofs of St Sebastian. He said I came naked and blood-wrapped and that he thought that it was me screaming, until I drew closer and he saw the grim seal of my mouth. Brother Gains, never a man given to religion, crossed himself and stepped aside without a word when I passed him. He watched the taut rope and shrank back further as the screams grew more loud and more piercing. And out of the darkness, lit by the flames of St Sebastian, Bishop Murillo came dragging, leaving his own trail of blood and skin on the grit and gravel of the cemetery path, white bone jutting from beneath the rope that bound his broken ankles.

  I let Katherine share that night. I let her watch the brothers take to horse and ride whooping up the road toward the distant orange glow. She saw how I bound Murillo and how such terror ran in him that he forgot the agony of his shattered ankles. And I taught her how long it can take to hammer thirteen nails through a man’s skull, tap, tap, tap. How night shades into day and brothers gather once again, draped in loot and relics, black with char. The brothers formed my audience, some fascinated, like Rike with his new iron cross around his neck, set with a circle of red enamel at the crossing point – red for the blood of Christ. Some watched in horror, some with reserve, but they all watched, even the Nuban with nothing written on his face but the deep lines of sorrow.

  ‘We’re meat and dirt,’ I told them. ‘Nobody is clean and nothing can wash away our stain, not the blood of the innocent, not the blood of the lamb.’

  And the brothers watched as a child learned what revenge can do, and what it can’t. Together Katherine and I watched that child learn how a simple iron nail can break a man’s mind apart, causing him to laugh, or cry, to lose some basic skill, some memory, or some restraint that made him human or gave a measure of dignity. I let Katherine see how something so simple as hammering home a nail can make such profound changes, to the bishop whose head is pierced, and to the boy who wields the hammer. And then I let her go. And she ran.

  My dreams would be my own again. I was past games.

  9

  I woke to the sound of Makin’s voice.

  ‘Get up, Jorg.’

  In the Haunt I have a page schooled in the art of discreet coughs and a gradual elevation in volume until his royal highness deigns to stir. In Lord Holland’s house it seemed ‘get up’ was the best on offer. I struggled to a sitting position, still in the clothes I wore the night before and more tired than when I fell into the bed.

  ‘And a very good morning to you, Lord Makin.’ My tone made it clear I meant none of it.

  ‘Miana’s here,’ he said.

  ‘Right.’ I rolled off the bed onto my feet, still woozy with sleep. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Not shaving?’ He offered me my cloak from the chair.

  ‘It’s the new style,’ I said, and went out into the corridor beyond, past the guards stationed outside the door. ‘Left or right?’

  ‘Left. She’s in the blue room.’

  And yes, Lord Holland had a whole room, the size of a church hall, given over to displaying the colour blue. Miana stood, pale, pretty, her hands across the stretch of her belly, Marten beside her, leaning on a staff for support, his face black with bruising. At the rear of the room, ten men from my guard, cloaks clasped with the Ancrath boar in silver, stood tight around a black coffer, Sir Riccard with them.

  I crossed the room and put my arms around Miana. I needed to touch her with my own hands after being locked into the dream with hands I didn’t own that tried to kill her. She put her head against my chest and said nothing. She smelled good. Of nothing specific – just good. Makin followed in behind and closed the door.

  ‘I saw the assassin,’ I said. ‘A white man, sent from the Vatican, or made to look as though he was. I saw you kill him. You and Marten both.’ I nodded to him. He knew what it meant to me.

  Miana looked up, eyes wide with surprise starting to narrow with confusion, suspicion even. ‘How?’

  ‘I think he used dream-magics to make the castle sleep, even the trolls below. When you use those methods and spend your power so carelessly, you leave yourself open to others with such skills. Perhaps something of Sageous rubbed off on me when I killed him.’ I shrugged. ‘In any case, you know I have bad dreams. It might be easier to fall into such enchantments from a nightmare than from honest sleeping.’ I didn’t mention Katherine. It didn’t seem politic to remind her that another woman filled my nights.

  ‘We found these on him.’ Marten held out a scroll, three gold coins, and a signet ring.

  The ring held an intaglio in a silver mount, carnelian worked with an intricate device, the papal seal with one bar. It gave the bearer an authority little short of a cardinal’s. I dropped it back into Marten’s palm and took the scroll.

  ‘A warrant for your death, Miana.’

  ‘Mine!’ Outrage rather than fear.

  ‘It’s very pretty.’ The scribe had illuminated it to a high order and not scrimped on the gold leaf. It must have taken a week’s work at least. ‘It’s possible they’re forgeries, but I doubt it. The trouble the forger would earn for themselves would outweigh any gain. And besides, the Pope does have good reason.’

  Miana stepped back, her eyes blazing. ‘Good reason! What offence have I ever given the church?’ She clutched herself all the tighter.

  ‘It’s to punish me, my dear.’ I spread my hands to offer up my guilt. ‘The Vatican must have finally tied me to the sack of St Sebastian’s, and more importantly to them, tied me to the maiming of Bishop Murillo Ap Belpan.’

  ‘But you’re lord of Belpan now. That line is gone.’ Anger muddied her logic.

  ‘It’s probably the “bishop” part that has them upset,’ I said.

  ‘The warrant should be for you, then!’ Miana said.

  ‘The church frowns on killing kings. It goes against their views on divine right. They’d rather slap my wrist and show me to be penitent. If that fails then perhaps I might die of an ague over the winter, but nothing so obvious as a warranted assassin.’

  ‘What will we do?’ Marten asked. He held his voice calm but I think if I’d told him to take ten thousand men and lay siege to Roma, he would have left to do it without further question.

  ‘I think we should open the box,’ I said. ‘I hope some
body thought to bring the key.’

  Miana fished the heavy piece of iron from her skirts and put it in my hand, still warm from her flesh. I waved the guards aside and fitted key to lock.

  ‘Some kind of weapon?’ Makin asked. He stood beside Miana now, an arm around her.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Some kind of weapon.’

  I threw back the lid. Gold coins, stacked and tightly bound in columns, reached nearly to the lid, a sea of them, enough to buy Holland’s mansion ten times over.

  ‘That,’ said Makin, letting his hand fall from Miana’s shoulder as he stepped closer, ‘is a lot of gold.’

  ‘Two years of taxes gathered from seven nations,’ I said.

  ‘You’re going to hire your own assassins?’ Marten asked.

  ‘You could hire an army with that. A large one.’ Makin stooped so low the reflected light made his face golden.

  ‘No.’ I flipped the lid shut and Makin flinched.

  ‘You’re going to build the cathedral,’ Miana said.

  ‘Praise the Lord for clever women. That boy you’re cooking for me in there is going to be scary clever.’

  ‘Build a cathedral?’ Makin blinked. Marten held his peace. Marten trusted my judgement. Too much sometimes.

  ‘An act of contrition,’ Miana said. ‘Jorg is going to buy the most expensive pardon in history.’

  ‘And of course the Pope is bound by tradition and duty to attend the consecration of any new cathedral.’ I turned one of the assassin’s gold pieces over in my fingers. The word ‘contrition’ nibbled at the edge of my pride.

  ‘Jorg!’ Miana narrowed her eyes at me, knowing my mind. She had known it from the start and sought to turn me with talk of diplomacy.

  The Pope stared at me from the Vatican gold. Blood gold for my child and wife. Pious CXII. When they showed you fat on money then you must truly be enormous. I held the coin up for inspection. ‘Don’t worry, my dear. I’ll play nice. When she comes to see the new cathedral I’ve built for her I will thank her for coming. Only a madman would threaten the Pope. Even if she is a bitch.’