Emperor of Thorns tbe-3 Read online

  ‘What?’

  I kicked the brush around my ankles and set my left hand to the pit wall. ‘This wasn’t put here to break our fall.’ My fingers came away sooty. ‘They burn people here.’

  More noise from above, an angry debate.

  ‘You better lower a rope if you want this idiot alive,’ I shouted.

  A shrill laugh, more heated words exchanged.

  ‘Ah, who am I kidding?’ I sliced his throat on the blade of my sword and wrestled him around so the spray of his blood wouldn’t be wasted. ‘Who looks over the edge? It’s not as if he knew we didn’t have a knife to throw.’

  Five torches arced in together before the idiot’s neck had stopped pulsing. With the brush damped down and our wits about us we managed to get the torches secured and stamp out any burning patches. The smoke covered the stench of blood and soiled corpses. When we were done Sunny met my gaze.

  ‘You killed her so you had something to throw?’

  ‘That would have been enough of a reason — you saw how she moved, she wouldn’t help in a fight. But no.’

  ‘For the blood?’

  ‘So I didn’t have to watch them take as long as they could to kill her. If you knew how these sorts of men work, you’d be asking for me to take your head too.’

  ‘But I get a choice?’

  ‘You might be useful yet,’ I said.

  Our prison looked to be a fissure running for fifteen yards or so, three yards across at its widest where we fell into it.

  I searched the idiot and found not one but two daggers, one for brawling, one balanced for throwing. I let Sunny have the bigger of the two.

  ‘What now?’ he asked. I could feel his fear but he kept it controlled. Holding a sword always leaves you with a little slice of hope.

  ‘Now we wait for them to figure out how to kill us.’ Anger kept my fear at bay. I wanted to take as many of them with me as could be managed. Dying in a dusty hole in the middle of nowhere hadn’t figured in my plans and knowing that I was going to do just that left a sour taste in my mouth. How the hell did we manage to run into a hole with all this space around us in any case?

  ‘You in the pit!’ A shout from outside. No heads peeping over this time.

  I kept silent. Two more torches arced in, trailing sparks and smoke across the pale sky. It seemed pointless given that five hadn’t done the job. The sharp jab in my shoulder came as I was bending down for the closest brand.

  ‘What?’ I heard Sunny’s exclamation. If the word ‘what’ had been taken away from him he wouldn’t have had much to say that day.

  I could have told him it felt like some kind of venom, but he’d probably worked that out by then. A numbness had spread over my shoulder before I managed to stand, turn, and throw my knife at the dark face behind the blowpipe on the far edge of the pit. I missed. Another dart hit me in the chest, a little black thing half a finger in length.

  ‘Fuck.’

  The third dart set me slumped over my sword, without the strength to look up. It might be said it’s never too hot for armour, but I’d have run slower than Lesha if I’d kept it on.

  Men dropped into the pit and they hauled us out of there like meat, ropes round our chests, limbs trailing without sensation. It’s not so hard to keep fear at arms’ length with a sword. When you’re helpless and in the grip of men for whom your pain is the only decent entertainment for miles around, you’d be mad not to be terrified.

  Two men had hold of my arms, and the creature that darted me followed along where my heels dragged trails in the dust. My legs were red to well above the knee, dust caking onto the wet blood. The creature looked like a girl, eleven maybe, almost skeletal, burned dark by the sun. She grinned and waved her blowpipe at me.

  ‘Ghoul darts. From the Cantanlona.’ She had a high clear voice.

  ‘Hard come by,’ said one of the men on my arms. ‘You’d better be worth it.’

  They dragged us three hundred yards or so to a campground. Our horses and Balky were already there, tied to a rail. The horses tugged at their ropes, nervous, thirsty maybe. Balky just looked bored. The encampment seemed semi-permanent, with a few lean-to shacks in even worse condition than those in Carrod Springs, a cart, some water barrels, a chicken or two and in the middle, four thick posts set into the ground. It said a lot about the Perros Viciosos that they had put more construction material and effort into their infrastructure for torture than into their own living arrangements.

  I counted about thirty men, as various in their origins and appearance as my own road-brothers, but with a predominance of dark-haired men, Spanards from the interior, an older and more pure bloodline than found in the coast regions, most of them lean and with a dangerous look to them. By my reckoning we’d left five of them dead. None of those in sight bore fresh wounds.

  Two men strung Sunny up to one pole then came back for me. The rest watched, or ate, or squabbled over our possessions, or all three. Several men had reached for the box at my hip, but always their hands had fallen away, their interest gone. None of them offered so much as a kick or a punch, as if wanting to keep us in as good health as possible until the fun started.

  ‘That’s Jorg Ancrath,’ Sunny told them. ‘King of the Renner Highlands, grandson of Earl Hansa.’

  The Bad Dogs didn’t bother to reply, just tightened our ropes and set about their business. Waiting is part of the exercise. Letting the tension rise, like bakers’ dough in the tin. Sunny kept talking, kept telling them who I was, who he was, what would happen if we weren’t let go. The girl came over to watch us. She held out a hand filled with a large beetle scrabbling to get away.

  ‘Mutant,’ she said. ‘Count the legs.’

  It had eight. ‘Ugly thing,’ I told her.

  She pulled off two of its legs. The bug was big enough for me to hear the crack as the limbs came free. ‘All better.’ She put it down and it took off across the dust.

  ‘You killed Sancha,’ she said.

  ‘The big ugly idiot?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I didn’t like him.’

  The men set a fire in the blackened space before the poles. A small one, for wood is rare in the Iberico.

  ‘He’s the King of the Renner Highlands,’ Sunny shouted at them. ‘He has armies!’

  ‘Renar,’ I said. The numbness started to fade from my limbs, my strength making a slower return.

  A woman came out of one of the shacks, a crone with sparse grey hair and a long nose. She unrolled a hide across the ground, displaying an assortment of knives, hooks, drills, and clamps. Sunny set to struggling. ‘You can’t do this, you bastards.’

  Only they could.

  I knew it wouldn’t be long before he was begging me to get him out of this, then cursing me for getting him into it. At least I didn’t have Lesha doing the same on the other side of me. I knew what would happen because I’d seen it before. I also knew that the quiet ones, the ones biding their time like me, would scream just as loud and beg just as uselessly in the end. I watched the men as they gathered, catching what names I could, Rael, tall and thin with a scar across his throat, Billan, pot-bellied, a salt-and-pepper beard, pig eyes. I muttered the names to myself. I would hunt them down in hell.

  14

  Five years earlier

  While the old woman worked to expose Sunny’s ribs, the girl brought me her latest find. She held the scorpion’s claws together in one tight fist and kept the stinger stretched out with the other hand. Eight legs writhed in a fury of motion. The thing had to be a good twelve inches from claw tip to sting. I could see the strain of holding it in the small knots of muscle along her arm bones.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not right!’ She had to shout to be heard amid Sunny’s screaming.

  ‘Mutant?’ It looked fine to me, just much bigger than I like my scorpions.

  The old woman tossed down another strip of skin and two scrawny chickens chased after it. The men, crowded before the posts, cheered. Most of them sat cross-
legged with some kind of liquor to hand in waxed leather tubes from which they sipped. All of them seemed content to let the crone ply her trade. Some chatted between themselves, but most showed an interest and would applaud the deft knife-work at the completion of each stage. I noted that one man had found Lesha’s head and held it in his lap, angled toward the posts. There were few among the Bad Dogs who matched the intensity with which she watched us.

  ‘Not mutant. Wrong.’ She strained to crack the creature’s back but couldn’t. The legs kept up the frenzy of writhing. ‘Can’t you hear it?’

  I could barely hear her over Sunny’s screaming, let alone her new pet. In truth I think he screamed to take his mind off what was being done, the real hurting had yet to start. Torture is more than pain and the Perros Viciosos knew it. Certainly the old woman knew it. She hadn’t really begun on him yet, but the mutilation hurt worse than agony that leaves no mark. When the torturer does damage that obviously won’t heal they underscore the irreversibility of it all. This won’t get better. This won’t go away. It lets the man know he is just meat and veins and sinew. Flesh for the butcher.

  The girl, Gretcha, held the scorpion to my face. I craned away, rewarded by a full view of Sunny’s chest, the white of rib bones showing through the narrow slots cut to reveal them. Veins stood out in sharp relief across his neck, eyes screwed shut.

  I heard it then, the strange whir, click, and tick behind the dry thrashing of legs. It set me in mind of the noise when I put the Builders’ watch to my ear, the sound of cogs, of metal teeth meshing with impossible precision. I turned and stared at the thing and for one fragment of a second its black eyes blinked crimson.

  Gretcha threw the scorpion down and started to chase it, beating at it with a heavy stick. One blow broke most of the legs along the left side. She vanished from the corner of my eye still chasing the crippled arachnid. I could turn my head no further. The red flash echoed behind my eyelids and for some reason I saw Fexler’s red star once more, blinking over the Iberico.

  It took the better part of an hour for the old woman to finish her work and in that time she used most of the tools from the wrap she had rolled out at the start. She made an artwork of Sunny’s chest and arms, cutting, searing, tearing pieces away, unpeeling layers, pinning them back. He howled at her of course, and at me, demanding release, that I do something, begging me, and before long he swore terrible revenge, not on his tormentors but on Jorg Ancrath who had brought him to this fate.

  Fear ran in me — how would it not? Terror ran through me in a hot rush, then as ice along veins, making my fingers and face prickle with pins and needles. But I tried to fool myself that I sat in the audience, watching with the casual cruelty of road-brothers at rest. And to some degree I succeeded for I have sat and watched, on too many occasions, from the times before I really understood such suffering to the times where I understood it and didn’t care. The strong will hurt the weak, it’s the natural order. But strapped there in the hot sun, waiting my turn to scream and break, I knew the horror of it and despaired.

  At last the crone stepped back, red to the elbows, but with scarcely a drop on her clothes or face. She turned to her audience, mocked a curtsey, and went back to her shack with her tools in their roll beneath one arm.

  Cheers from the crowd, some quite drunk now. Harsh rasping breaths from Sunny, his head hanging low, one eye wide and staring, the other tight shut. The tall man, Rael, stood and advanced to secure Sunny’s head to the post with leather straps. Off by the shacks someone took a piss, another man scattered grain for the hens.

  ‘Gretcha!’ The round-bellied man, Billan, called out for the girl.

  She came from behind the posts with the slash of a grin on her skull face, dropping a handful of broken insect parts, legs and glossy black plates. Billan set a stool for the girl to stand on, close to Sunny’s post.

  Gretcha went to the fire without further prompting and took the iron that had been set there. I hadn’t seen it placed. She grasped it by the cloth-wrapped end and held the dull orange end toward us. ‘No!’ Sunny understood the leather straps around his forehead. I couldn’t blame his struggles. I would be struggling and telling them no when my turn came.

  In the fire strange shapes danced. The sun made ghosts of the flame and I had to squint, but I saw them, shapes and colours that had no place there. Delirium setting in from the heat and terror. Perhaps madness would claim my mind before they even started on me.

  ‘You’re too loud.’ Gretcha pushed the hot iron into Sunny’s mouth. His clenched lips shrivelled away before the iron’s glare. Teeth cracked at the iron’s touch. I heard them. They became brittle and shattered as she pushed. Steam poured from his mouth, steam and awful screaming and the smell of roasting.

  I looked away, blinded with tears as the little girl put his eyes out. I could say I wept for Sunny, or for the horror of a world where such things happen, but in truth I wept for myself, in fear. At the sharp end of things there is only room for ourselves.

  The Bad Dogs whooped and cheered at the sport. Some called out names, presumably of the men who we had killed, but it meant nothing. We would have suffered the same tortures if they had captured us in our sleep without loss.

  ‘Gretcha.’ Billan again. ‘Enough with that one. Mary will find something more in him later. Put the other’s eye out. Just one. I don’t like the way he’s been looking at me.’

  The girl pushed the end of the iron into the hot embers and stood watching it, her back to me. I pulled at my bonds. They knew how to tie a man, not just at the wrists but at the elbows and higher too. I pulled anyhow. Anger rose in me. It wouldn’t stand before the iron, but for a moment at least it chased away some measure of the fear. Anger at my tormentors and anger at the foolishness of it, dying in some meaningless camp filled with empty people, people going nowhere, people for whom my agony would be a passing distraction.

  When Gretcha turned back I met her gaze and ignored the hot draw of the iron.

  ‘Keep a steady hand, girl.’ I gave her a savage grin, hating her with a sudden intensity so fierce it hurt.

  Are you dangerous? I had asked the Nuban when they held the irons over him. I’d given him his chance, loosed one hand, and he had seized it. Are you dangerous? Yes, he had said, and I told him to show me. I wanted that chance now. Let her say the words. Are you dangerous?

  Instead her smile fell away and her hand wavered, just a touch.

  ‘Stop!’ Rael called. ‘His head isn’t bound. You could kill him.’

  He came across and secured me with more straps. I watched him, trying to commit each detail of his face to memory. He would be one of the last people I saw.

  ‘Give me the iron.’ He snapped the words out, taking it from Gretcha’s hands. ‘I’ll do this one myself.’ Returning my glare he said, ‘You might be a lord of some sort. You had enough gold on you. And this.’ He held up his wrist to show the watch from my uncle’s treasury. ‘But we both know that if you were ransomed you would do nothing but hunt us from the moment you were free and safe. I can see it in you.’

  I couldn’t lie to him. There would be no point. If I were free I would hunt them over any distance at any cost.

  ‘Looks like you’ve done this before.’ Rael nodded at my cheek. ‘Maybe we should start where they left off, just to remind you how it felt.’

  The red-hot tip of the iron approached the thick scar tissue reaching across the left side of my face. No waver in Rael’s hand however fierce my stare. Gretcha stood beside him, her head reaching only a little past his waist.

  The heat scorched my lips and dried the wetness from my eyes, but in the scar-tissue no pain, just a warmth, pleasant almost. The burn had killed all sensation in that flesh, I could scratch it with my nails and only feel the tugging in the untouched skin just below my eye. The iron rested a little below my cheekbone with the pressure of a poking finger. Puzzlement reshaped Rael’s brow.

  ‘He won’t b-’

  A sudden pulse of pleasur
e flushed through the scar tissue, almost orgasmic, and a flash of heat closed my eyes. The stink of my hair crisping filled my nostrils. Rael screamed and when I looked again the dance had him. That dance men do when unexpected agony seizes them, a stubbed toe or blow to that tricksy bone in the elbow will start it off often as not. He held the wrist of his right hand in the grip of his left. And there, seared across the exposed palm, deep enough to reach the little bones that fill the hand, the line the iron had left on him. The iron itself lay in the dust, bright and shining, as white with heat as if it were at the bellows’ mouth in a forge, the cloth burning around it.

  I had to laugh. What were they going to do if I laughed at them? Hurt me? In the shock of it I had bitten my tongue and I laughed now with the taste of blood filling my mouth and the warmth of it running crimson over my lips.

  ‘Idiot.’ Billan got up and pushed Rael out of his way. He caught my chin and jaw in a painful grip. ‘What did you do, boy?’

  ‘Boy?’ It hurt to get the word out with his fingers digging into my jaw muscles. I didn’t know what I’d done but I was glad of it. I suspected something in the fragments of Gog bedded in that scar had reacted to the touch of so much heat.

  ‘Answer me.’

  Even now Billan thought he had something to threaten me with. I spat blood into his face. He staggered away with a girlish shriek and that set me laughing all the more. Hysteria had me in its claws. Others among the Perros Viciosos got to their feet. One slab of muscle named Manwa, brother to Sancha who I killed in the pit, took Billan’s arm and tried to settle him. A dirty rag set to the blood didn’t seem able to wipe it off. Seconds later a better view showed that the skin itself had turned scarlet where the blood touched, and in his eyes the blood had scalded his cornea a milky white. It seemed the necromancy that lurked within me and would kill small things through just a touch of my fingers, really did run in my veins.

  ‘Get Old Mary back!’ Billan shouted it in his blindness. The effort to hold himself back, to deny the lust to choke the life out of me, made him tremble. ‘I want him to scream for a month.’