King of Thorns Page 13

  “See anything you like?” A soft voice behind me.

  “I do now.” I turned to face her. She looked good.

  “Jorg,” Serra said. “My sweet Jorg. A king no less.”

  I shrugged. “I never did know when to stop.”

  She smiled. “No.” Dark and delicious.

  “I saw Thomas back there, putting on a show,” I said.

  Serra pouted at the mention of her husband. “It never stops amazing me, how people want to watch that.”

  “That’s why the circus keeps on moving,” I said. “Everything gets old quick enough. The swallowing of swords, the blowing of fire, they’re wonders for an evening or two…”

  “And did I get old quick enough?” she asked. “King Jorg of the Highlands?”

  “Never,” I said. If the sins of the flesh ever got old I didn’t ever want enough years on me to know it. “I’ve not found a girl to compare.”

  “Girl” may have been pushing it but she was a good ten years younger than Thomas, and who better than a circus contortionist to deliver a boy’s first lessons in carnality?

  Serra stepped closer, shawl tight around her shoulders against the chill of the breeze. She moved in that fluid way that reminds every watcher she can cross her ankles behind her head. Even so, on her cheeks, here and there, the white powder cracked, and around her eyes the unkind morning light found tiny wrinkles. She wore her hair still in ribbons and bunches, but now it looked wrong on her and a thread or two of silver laced the blackness of it.

  “How many rooms does your palace have, Jorg?” A husk in her voice. A hint of something desperate at the back of her smile.

  “Lots,” I said. “Most of them cold, stony, and damp.” I didn’t want her to go begging and dirty up my golden memories. I didn’t know what I’d come looking for around the circus camp; Taproot’s stories for sure, but not now, not here in the messy reality behind the show-ring mask. I didn’t know what I’d come for, but not this, not Serra showing her years and her need.

  A moment’s silence, then a growl came, too deep and throaty for a bear, like a giant rasp drawn across timber.

  “What the—”

  “Lion,” Serra said. She twirled, brightening, and took my hand. “See?”

  And around the corner, at the bottom of the cage stack, Dr. Taproot did indeed have himself a lion. I hefted the Nuban’s bow to see the ironwork around the trigger guard. The beast in the cage might be a bit threadbare, showing too many ribs, but his dirty mane remembered the one framing the snarling face on the Nuban’s bow.

  “Well, there’s a thing,” I said. The Nuban had told me in his youth he walked scorched grasslands where lions hunted in packs, and even though the Nuban never lied, I only half-believed him. “There’s a thing.” Words failed me for once.

  “He’s called Macedon,” Serra said, leaning into me. “The crowds love him.”

  “What else has Taproot got caged? I expect a griffin next, then a unicorn and a dragon, a full heraldic set!”

  “Silly,” she husked. Old or not, that magic of hers had started to work on me. “Dragons aren’t real.” The twitch of a smile in her painted lips, her small and kissable mouth.

  I shook it off—the circus was too full of distractions. Distractions I wanted to make a full and thorough examination of. But I had ghosts at my heels and Gog about to burst into flame at any moment…

  “He looks hungry,” I said. “The circus can’t feed its main attraction?”

  “He won’t eat,” Serra said. “Taproot’s tearing his hair about it. Doesn’t know how long he’ll last.”

  The lion watched us, sat sphinx-like with his massive paws spread in the straw before him. I met his huge amber eyes and wondered what he saw. Probably a hunk of meat on two legs not meant for running.

  “He wants to hunt,” I said.

  “We give him meat,” Serra said. “Ron cuts him big hunks of cow, still bleeding. He barely sniffs it.”

  “He needs to take it,” I said. “Not be given it.”

  “That’s silly.” Her fingers ran along mine, starting fires.

  “It’s in his nature.” I looked away. I didn’t think I could win a staring competition with Macedon even if I had time to try.

  “You should let him go,” I said.

  Serra laughed, a note too shrill for comfort. “And what would he hunt? We should let him eat children?”

  A distant scream saved me answering. A distant scream and a tongue of flame reaching up above the tent tops. A dead cook-fire close by suddenly lit. The flame flared, sucked in like a drawn breath, and became a little man made all of fire, a homunculus no taller than a chicken. It glanced around for a heartbeat then tore off in the direction of the scream leaving the fire-pit black and smoking and a line of charred footprints behind it.

  Serra opened her mouth, ready to scream or shout, decided on neither, and took off after the flame-man.

  My gaze returned to the lion, who seemed wholly unmoved by the excitement.

  “Do you think Taproot will still want Gog in his freak-show now?” I asked.

  The lion gave no answer, just watched me with those amber eyes.

  The lions the Nuban had told me of were magnificent beasts, lords of the plains. He understood why men who had never seen one might fight beneath their likeness on a banner. When he spoke of lions on cold nights camped along the roadside, I had sworn to walk those same sun-scarred plains and see them for myself. I hadn’t imagined them caged, mangy, hopping with fleas beside a two-headed goat.

  A single nail pinned the cage door, secured with a twist of wire.

  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.”