King of Thorns be-2 Read online

  I had pulled a single pin to set the Nuban free years ago, worlds ago. I pulled a pin and he took two lives in as many moments.

  That Jorg would have pulled this pin too. That Jorg would have pulled this pin and not given a moment’s thought to children clustered around a sword-swallower, to the livelihoods of dancers and tumblers. To townsfolk or to Taproot’s revenge. But I’m not him. I’m not him because we die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.

  I didn’t forget the children or the dancers or the tumblers. But I pulled the pin. Because it’s in my nature.

  “For Kashta,” I said.

  I swung the door open and walked away. The lion would stay or leave, hunt or die, it didn’t matter, but at least he had a choice. As for me, I had a bridge to cross.

  I set off after Serra to see what damage Gog had done.

  Brother Sim looks pleasing enough, a touch pretty, a touch delicate, but sharp with it. Under the dyes his hair is a blond that takes the sun, under the drugs his eyes are blue, under the sky I know no one more private in their ways, more secret in their opinions, more deadly in a quiet moment.

  17

  Four years earlier

  When you journey north, past the River Rhyme, you start into the Danelands, those regions still unclaimed by the sea where the Vikings of old came ashore to conquer and then settle among the peoples who bowed before the axe. There are few Danes who will not claim Viking blood, but it’s not until the sea bars your path that such claims take on weight and you start to feel yourself truly among the men of the wild and frozen north.

  We crossed the bridge at Remagen leading our horses, for in places the metal weave of the deck had holes punched up through it, some the width of a spear, some wide enough to swallow a man. Nowhere did rust have a hold on the silver metal, and what had made the holes no one could say. I remembered the peasant in his house of gravestones back by Perechaise, unable to read a single legend from them. I shouldn’t have sneered. We live in a world made from the Builders’ graves and can read almost none of the messages they carry, and understand fewer still.

  We left Remagen without trouble and rode hard along the North Way so that trouble wouldn’t catch us up if it followed. Farms, forests, villages untouched by war, good land to ride through with the sun on your back. It set me in mind of Ancrath, cottages golden with thatch, orchards in bloom, all so fragile, so easy to erase.

  “Thank you for not burning up too much of the circus, Gog,” I said.

  “I’m sorry for the fire, Jorg,” Gog said behind me.

  “No great harm done,” I said. “Besides, the stories they tell about it will bring more people to the show.”

  “Did you see the little men?” Gog asked.

  “The midgets?” I asked.

  His claws dug in. “My little men, from the fire.”

  “I saw them,” I said. “It looked like they were trying to pull you in.”

  “Gorgoth stopped them,” Gog said. I couldn’t tell if he was happy or sad about that.

  “You shouldn’t go,” I said. “You need to learn more. To know how to be safe. To know that you can come back. That’s why we’re going to Ferrakind. He can teach you these things.”

  “I think I’ve seen him,” Gog said. At first I didn’t think I’d heard right above the thud and clatter of hooves.

  “I can look into one fire and see out of another,” Gog said. “All sorts of things.” He giggled at that and for a moment he sounded like William, laughing on the morning we climbed into that carriage.

  “Did he see you?” I asked.

  I felt him nod against my back.

  “We’d best go on then,” I said. “There’s no hiding from him now. Best find out what he has to say.”

  We rode on and the rain started to fall, the kind of rain that comes and goes in the spring, cold and sudden and leaving the world fresh.

  Heimrift lies in the Danelore, a hard ride from the Rhyme-lands. We made good speed and paced the season, caught in an unending wave of wakening, as if we carried the May with us.

  Gorgoth ran beside me as often as not, tireless, pounding the road with great feet that seemed almost hooves. He spoke so seldom that it made you want him to, as if by storing each word he made it precious. I found him to be a deep thinker though he had never read a book or been taught by anyone.

  “Why do you ask so much?” he asked once, his arms punching in and out like the great engine at York as he ran.

  “The unexamined life is not worth living,” I said.

  “Socrates?”

  “How in hell do you know that?” I asked.

  “Jane,” he said.

  I grunted. She could have reached out from the dark halls of the leucrotas, that child, even without taking a step from the entrance caves. I had walked some of the paths she took, and the paths of the mind can take you anywhere.

  “Who was she to you anyhow?” I asked.

  “My eldest sister,” he said. “Only two of us lived from my mother’s line. The rest.” He glanced at Gog. “Too strong.”

  “She was fire-sworn too?” I remembered the ghost-fire dancing across her.

  “Fire-sworn, light-sworn, mind-sworn.” Gorgoth’s eyes narrowed to slits as he watched me. Jane died because of my actions, because of me, because I hadn’t cared if she lived or not. Mount Honas had fallen on Jane and the necromancer both. The wrong one survived. I still owed Chella for the Nuban and other Brothers besides, but even my thirst for vengeance wouldn’t see me digging in the burning wastes of Gelleth for her any time soon.

  “Damnation!” It suddenly struck me that I should have asked Taproot about the Dead King. The excitement of the circus had somehow put him out of my mind. Given that a dozen and more severed heads had mouthed the Dead King’s name at me, it’s a tribute to the power of sawdust and greasepaint that they could push it out.

  Gorgoth turned his head but didn’t ask.

  “Who’s the Dead King?” I asked him. Gorgoth had enough dealings with the necromancers, and who better than necromancers to know about someone who speaks through corpses.

  “ Who he is I can’t say.” Gorgoth spoke in the rhythm of his running. “I can tell you something of what he is.”

  “Yes?”

  “A new power, risen in the dry places beyond the veil, in the deadlands. He speaks to those that draw their strength there.”

  “He spoke to Chella?” I asked.

  “To all the necromancers.” A nod. “They did not want to listen, but he made them.”

  “How?” Chella struck me as a hard person to coerce.

  “Fear.”

  I sat back in the saddle and chewed that one over. Gorgoth ran in silence, matching Brath’s trot, and for the longest time I thought he wouldn’t speak again. But then he said, “The Dead King talks to all who reach past death.”

  “So what should I do when he talks to me?”

  “Run.”

  Gorgoth’s sister had once given me the same advice. I resolved to take it this time.

  We made good time and each evening I fought Makin, learning at every turn and occasionally teaching him a new trick. I taught him a new trick the very first day I met him, training squires in the Tall Castle. Since then, though, the process had seen a slow reversal. Somewhere along the line Makin turned from my rescuer, sent out by Father to recover me, into a follower, and ever since he decided to follow my lead the man had been teaching me. Not with books and charts like Tutor Lundist but in that sneaky, indirect way the Nuban had, the kind of way that gets under your skin and turns you slowly by example.

  Four days out from Remagen a storm found us on the plains, a fierce cold squall carrying all the cruelty that spring can muster. Lashed by rain we found our way to the town of Endless by tracks turned to swollen streams. Some lordling undoubtedly calls Endless his own but whatever men he set to watch over it had found better things to watch that night. We clattered
unopposed along the cobbled main street and found a stable by the glow of a single lantern hung behind the torrent spilling from its eaves. The stable-keep allowed that Gog and Gorgoth could stay with the horses. Taking the pair among the good folk of Endless would be an invitation to carnage.

  “We’ll be out of here at dawn,” I told the stable-keep, a lean fellow, pockmarked, but along one side only, as if the pox had found no foothold on his right half. “Let me return to find gawkers here staring at my monsters and I’ll have the big one twist your legs off. Understand?”

  He understood.

  We shed our sodden cloaks in some nameless tavern and sat steaming before a cold hearth while a serving girl fetched our ales. The place was packed with wet and sweating bodies, lumbermen in the main, some stinking drunk, others just stinking. We drew looks, not a few of them hostile, but none that lasted long when offered back.

  Sim had his harp with him, a battered thing but quality, stolen from a very rich home once upon a time. He’d pulled it from his saddlebag and unwrapped it with the kind of care he usually reserved for weapons. As our drinks arrived he started to pluck a tune from it. He had quick fingers did Sim, quick and clever, and the notes rolled out fast enough to make a river.

  By the time I left for my bed, in the inn across the road, the storm had passed. Sim and Makin had half the locals bawling out “Ten Kings,” and Sim’s voice, high and clear, followed me out of the door, rising over the deeper refrain and Makin’s enthusiastic baritone. Strains of “The Shallow Lady” reached up through the window as I poked my way in under crawling blankets and let the bugs set to. At least it was dry. I fell asleep to the faint sounds of the nonsense doggerel “Merican Pie.”

  I woke much later in the calm dead hours of the night, still tangled in the song though all lay quiet save for the brothers’ snoring.

  Chevylevy was dry.

  Moonlight reached across the room and offered me two figures in the doorway, one supporting the other. Makin stopped to close the door behind him. Sim hobbled on, something broken about his walking.

  “Trouble?” I sat up, the ale still spinning in me.

  My, my, missamerican pie.

  Why two drunk brothers staggering in should spell trouble I couldn’t have said, but I knew trouble was what we had.

  Makin turned, pulling aside the hood on the lantern he’d brought up with him. “I found him in the street,” he said. “Left him an hour ago with five locals, the last in the tavern.”

  Sim looked up. They’d given him a hell of a beating, lips split and swollen, half a tooth gone, one eye full of blood. From the way he moved I guessed he’d be pissing pink for a week. In fact something in the way he moved suggested other kinds of hurt had been done to him.

  “They took my harp, Brother.” He turned out his empty hands. It had been a time and a half since Sim had called me Brother. I wondered what else had been taken.

  I kicked Rike in the head. “Up!” Kent and Grumlow were already rising from the floor. “Get up,” I said again.

  “Trouble?” Kent asked, echoing my own question. He sat still in the dark, moonlight making black pits of his eyes. Always ready for trouble was Red Kent, though he never sought it out.

  Grumlow found his feet quick enough and took Sim’s arm. The boy flinched him off but Grumlow took firmer hold and led him to the window. “Bring the lantern, Makin, some stitches needed here.”

  “Five of them?” I asked.

  Sim nodded as he passed me.

  “I can’t let this stand,” I said.

  Makin let the lantern drop an inch or two at that. “Jorg-”

  “They took the harp,” I said. “That’s an insult to the Brotherhood.” I let the pride of the Brotherhood take the slur: it would shame Sim to have this be for him.

  Makin shrugged. “Sim cut at least one of them. There’s a trail of blood in the street.”

  “Were they armed?” I asked. Know thy enemy.

  Makin shook his head. “Knives. Probably have their wood-axes to hand by now. Oh, and the short one, he had a bow. Likes to do a bit of hunting he said.”

  My, my.

  I threw the bundle of my blankets at Rike and made for the door. “Let’s be about it then. You too, Brother Sim, you’ll want to see this.”

  I let Rike go first into the street and followed, watching the dark windows, the lines of the rooftops. Makin found the trail of blood drops again, black in the cold light of the moon, and we followed, past the church, past the well, along the alley between tannery and stables, the dull rumble of Gorgoth’s snore from within deeper than the snort of horses. Past a warehouse, a low wall, and out into the rough pasture between town and forest. We gathered with our backs to a barn, the last building before the woods took over. No one had to be told-your enemy has a bow, you keep a building at your back and don’t let the light silhouette you.

  “They’re in the forest,” Grumlow said.

  “They won’t be far in.” Makin set the lantern to one side, its light hidden.

  “Why not?” Grumlow asked, eyes on the black line of the trees.

  “The moon won’t reach in there. Not a place to walk blind.” I lifted my voice loud enough for the men in the woods. “Why don’t you come out? We only want to talk.”

  An arrow hammered into the barn wall yards above my head; laughter followed. “Send your girlfriend in after us if she wants some more.”

  Grumlow took a step forward at that, but he wasn’t dumb enough to take another. Rike on the other hand took two and would have taken more if I hadn’t barked his name. It was Rike’s true brother, Price, who took young Sim from that Belpan brothel in the long ago. Why he picked one child to save and made red slaughter of the rest, along with the grown whores and their master, none of the brothers could ever tell me, but it seemed to matter to Rike that he had. And there it is, proof if proof were needed, that though God may mould the clay and fashion some of us hale, some strong, some beautiful, inside we make ourselves, from foolish things, breakable, fragile things: the thorns, that dog, the hope that Katherine might make me better than I am. Even Rike’s blunt wants were born of losses he probably remembered only in dreams. All of us fractured, awkward collages of experience wrapped tight to present a defensible face to the world. And what makes us human is that sometimes we snap. And in that moment of release we’re closer to gods than we know. I told Rike no, but hardly a part of me didn’t want to charge those woods.

  “It’ll have to keep for morning,” Makin said.

  I didn’t like to admit it but he was right. I would have left it there save for Gorgoth coming along the alley beside the barn. A strange mix of clever and stupid, that one. He made a nice target with the moon bright behind him, a big one too. I heard the hiss of an arrow and then his deep grunt.

  “Here, idiot!” I called out to him and he lumbered to my side, Gog scampering around his legs. Makin lifted the lantern but I kept him from opening the hood. “He’s not dead. He can wait.”

  “Take more than an arrow,” Rike muttered.

  Even so, light blossomed and we saw the shaft jutting from Gorgoth’s shoulder, the head buried only an inch deep or so, as if the leucrota’s flesh were oak.

  “Makin! I said no-”

  But it wasn’t Makin. The light bled from Gog’s eyes, hot and yellow.

  I could have told Gog no, bundled him around a corner and left the woodsmen till morning, but the fire that burned in Gog at seeing Gorgoth harmed echoed a colder fire that lit in me when Sim hobbled through that door. I’d grown tired of saying no. Instead I took Gog’s hand, though the ghosts of flame whispered across his skin.

  He looked up at me, eyes white like stars. “Let it burn,” I told him.

  Something hot ran through me, up my arm, along the marrow of my bones, hot like a promise, anger made liquid and set running.

  “What’s cooking?” The taunt rang out from the tree-line, somewhere out past an old cowshed sagging in its beams.

  Gog and I walke
d toward the sound, slow footsteps, the ground sizzling where his bare feet touched wet grass.

  “The hell?” Voices raised in concern in the dark of the woods. An arrow zipped through the night, wide of its mark, the glowing child a disconcerting target, fooling the eye.

  We heard the hissing before we’d gone ten yards, a thousand snakes hissing in the darkness…or perhaps just steam escaping the trees as their sap started to boil. A laugh bubbled from me in the same way, escaping my heat. The anger I brought with me ignited, becoming too large for my body, detaching from the men who hurt Sim and becoming an end in and of itself, all-consuming, a glorious laughing ecstasy of rage.

  A skin of flame lifted from Gog, washing over me in a warm wave. Back in the forest the first of the trees exploded, its fragments bursting into incandescent flame as they found air. Fire lifted around the intact trunks, rising through the spring foliage, making each leaf a momentary shadow. More trees exploded, then more, until the blasts became a continuous rumble of brilliant detonation. The cattle-shed ignited though it stood twenty yards back from the closest flame, one side of it just snapping into liquid orange fire. I saw a lone archer running from the edge of the forest, clothes alight. Farther back human torches staggered and fell.

  That power, Brothers, is a drug. A fiercer joy than poppy-spice, and more sure to hollow you out. If Gorgoth hadn’t knocked me aside and snatched up Gog we neither of us would have stopped until no tree remained, no board or beam of Endless. Maybe not even then.

  Dawn found us still in the wet grass behind that barn, a smoking hole in the forest before us, acres wide. Gog went hunting amid the embers and returned with a twitching tangle, Sim’s harp strings fused together and twisted by the heat. He took them with a curious smile, lopsided from his beating. “My thanks, Gog.” He held them up and shook them so they rattled one against the next. “A simpler song, but still sweet.”

  And that was Endless.

  We saw the smoke days from our goal, still skirting the borders of the Teuton kingdoms. A grey column reached miles into the sky, mountain high and higher still, as if Satan were trying to smoke the angels out of heaven.