Emperor of Thorns Page 16

  ‘How goes his war, Princess?’ Osser Gant leant forward. He had quick ways about him for a greybeard, his eyes dark and cunning. I could see why Makin valued him.

  ‘The dead continue to press from the marshes, seldom great numbers in any one place, but enough to drain the land. Peasants are killed in their villages, their bodies dragged to the bogs, farmers die in their homesteads. The dead hide in the mud when Ancrath’s troops pursue, or they shelter in Ill-Shadow, in any place where the land is too poisoned for men. Gelleth has such places.’ She looked my way once more. ‘The attacks sap morale, leave food in short supply. Before I left there was talk of a lichkin walking the marsh.’

  Gomst crossed himself at that.

  ‘And what do they say in Olidan’s court about the direction of these attacks?’ Osser asked. A question of considerable interest to all Kennick men for although they had lost the marshes to the dead many years before, very little of the predation was on the Kennick dry lands. Makin’s troops had little cause for worry as long as they kept their feet on firm ground.

  ‘They say the Dead King hates King Olidan,’ Katherine said.

  ‘And what do you say, Katherine?’ Miana leaned across me, lily-scented, our child kicking my legs through her belly.

  ‘I say the black ships will sail up the Sane estuary and disgorge their troops into the marshes when the Dead King is ready to strike. And that from there they will move through Ancrath, sheltering in the scars the Builders left us, Ill Shadow, Eastern Dark, Kane’s Wound, what your people call “promised lands”, Queen. He will move into Gelleth along the paths Jorg opened with his destruction of Mount Honas, and continue by such means, gathering strength from many sources, until they reach Vyene where Congression’s endless voting will cease to matter.’

  ‘And is this what King Olidan has sent you to tell the Hundred?’ Gomst asked. He held his crucifix so tight that the gold bent in his grip, a zealot’s fire in his eye. Such passion made a stranger of the man after so many years of empty piety. ‘It is what the holy say. God tells them this.’

  A brittle laugh escaped Katherine. ‘Olidan knows the black ships will sail his way. He says Ancrath will hold, that this new contagion will be stamped out, that Ancrath will save the empire. He asks only that his right to the throne be acknowledged and whilst he leads his armies to save the Hundred they set the crown upon his lap and restore the stewardship. Of course he asks in more tactful language, in many messages suited to many ears, calling in old debts and promises.’ Her green eyes found me, our faces close, my leg pressed to hers and generating heat. ‘Filial duties remembered,’ she said.

  ‘Why—’

  Katherine cut me off. ‘Your father says he knows the Dead King. Knows his secrets. Knows how to undo him.’

  18

  Chella’s Story

  ‘What you’ve seen so far will not prepare you for this. Make a stone of your mind. Swear any oath that is asked of you.’ Chella straightened the collar of Kai’s robe and stood back to look at him again.

  ‘I will.’

  Ten years had settled on the young man overnight, tight lines around his mouth, lips narrowed. He wore the weariness around his eyes and in them. She hadn’t broken him. You can’t make necromancers from broken men. It’s a contract that must be entered into of one’s own will, and Kai had just enough of an instinct for self-preservation to will it. Beneath his charm and easy ways Chella imagined a hardness had always waited. She walked on and he followed her along the corridor.

  ‘Don’t look at any of them. Especially not the lichkin,’ she said.

  ‘Christ! Lichkin!’ He stopped and when she turned he backed away, the colour running from his face. For a moment it seemed that his knees would buckle. ‘I thought the king’s court were necromancers …’

  ‘The lichkin should be the least of your concerns.’ Chella couldn’t blame him. You had to meet the Dead King to understand.

  ‘But …’ Kai frowned. She saw his hand move beneath his robe. He would be holding the knife she gave him, taking comfort in a sharp edge. Men! ‘But if they’re dead, shouldn’t we be the ones to give the orders?’

  Fear and ambition, a good combination. Chella felt her lips twist, a sour smile. He had barely started to sense the deadlands, this one, made his first corpse twitch only hours before, and already he thought himself a necromancer and reached for the reins. ‘If they were fallen then yes, a necromancer would have raised them and a necromancer would rule them.’

  ‘They’re not dead?’ Again the frown.

  ‘Oh they’re dead. But they will never be ours to command. The lichkin are dead – but they never died. It’s given to us to call back what cannot enter heaven and restore it under our command to the flesh and bones it once owned. But in the deadlands, where we call the fallen from, there are things that are dead and that have never lived. The lichkin are such creatures and they are the Dead King’s soldiers. And in the darkest reaches of the deadlands, amongst such creatures, the Dead King came from nowhere and crowned himself in fewer than ten years.’

  She walked on and after a moment’s hesitation Kai followed. Where else had he to go?

  They passed several doors on the left, and shuttered windows on the right. A storm-wind rattled the heavy boards but the rain had yet to fall. Two guards waited at the corner, dead men in rusted armour, a faint aroma of decay about them overwritten by the eye-watering chemicals used to cure their flesh.

  ‘These are strong ones. I can feel it.’ Kai paused, lifting his hand toward the pair as if pressing against something in the air.

  ‘Not much of these passed on,’ Chella said. ‘Bad men. Bad lives. It left a lot to be called back into the body. Cunning, some measure of intelligence, some useful memories. Most of the guards here are like this. And when you find a corpse you can refill almost to the brim, well you don’t want it to rot away on you now, do you?’ The dead men watched her with shrivelled eyes, their dark thoughts unknowable.

  More corridors, more guards, more doors. The Dead King took the castle only months before from the last Brettan lord of any consequence, Artur Elgin, whose ships had sailed from the port below for twenty years and more, terrorizing the continental coasts north and south. Artur Elgin’s days of terror weren’t over. Indeed they had very much begun, though now he served the Dead King, or rather what had been called back from the deadlands did, and Chella suspected that was pretty much all of the man.

  Chella sensed the Dead King always, from a thousand miles she felt him as something crawling beneath her skin. In the castle where he laid his plans no place was free of the taste of him, bitter on the tongue.

  At last they came to the doors to Artur’s court, slabs of old oak with black iron hinges scrolling out across them. The bog-stink wrinkled her nose. Mire-ghouls watched them from the shadows to either side, some with black darts clutched in stained hands. Before the doors two giants, each more than eight foot tall, freaks from the promised lands, their dena scorched by the Builders’ fire so that they grew wrong. Big but wrong. And now dead. Meat-puppets held by the necromancers’ will.

  The giants stepped aside and Chella moved toward the doors. The presence of the Dead King overwhelmed that of his court, reaching through stone and wood to swamp her senses. In the fullness of Chella’s necromantic power, when she stepped as far from life as a person can and still return, she knew the Death King’s presence as a dark-light, a black sun whose radiance froze and corrupted but somehow still drew her on. Now though, dressed only in the tatters of her former strength, with her blood pumping once again, Chella felt her master as a threat, as something sculpted from every memory of hurt or harm or pain, screaming hatred in a register just beyond hearing.

  She set her hands to the doors and found them trembling.

  The stink of lichkin hits flesh like ink hits blotting paper: it sinks bone-deep, overriding irrelevances such as the nose. Men are busy dying from the moment they’re born but it’s a crawl from the cradle to the grave. Being ne
ar a lichkin makes it a race.

  The Dead King’s court lay in darkness but as Chella pushed the doors open a cold glow began to spread within the chamber. Ghosts, tight-wrapped around their masters, began to unfurl, like an outer skin, flayed from the lichkin by the presence of life. The spirits burned with the light of their own misery, pale apparitions, delicate tissues of memory, membranes of misused lives. The lichkin themselves were blind spots on her living eyes, as if patches of her retina had died, folding the room’s image over itself in those places. In times when the necromancy ran deep in her and her blood lay still, Chella had seen the lichkin, bone-white, bone-thin, the wedge of their eyeless heads filled with small sharp teeth, each hand dividing into three root-like fingers.

  ‘Kai!’ She felt his retreat. The sound of his name made him stop. He knew better than to run.

  The Dead King sat on Lord Artur Elgin’s driftwood throne. He wore Artur Elgin’s robes. They fitted him well. Blue-leather shoulders, a laced front fixed with silver clasps each set with sea-stone, the leather giving over to thick velvet of a deeper midnight blue. He wore Artur Elgin’s body too, and it fitted him less well, hunched and awkward, and when he lifted his head to Chella the smile that he made with the dead man’s mouth was an awful thing.

  19

  Five years earlier

  Two knives broke in the effort to uncoil the scorpion. When I locked its tail in place with Old Mary’s clamps and levered it apart using a sword, the corpse opened in a series of jerking releases, accompanied by crunches like glass breaking under a heel.

  ‘You’re something made,’ I told it. ‘A clever piece of clockwork.’

  I could see no cogs or wheels though, no matter how close I squinted. Just black crystal, traces of clear sparkling jelly and multitudes of wires, most of them so thin as to be on the edge of invisible.

  ‘Something broken.’ I put it into Lesha’s saddle-pack to take with me.

  It took hours to dig two graves. My wounds stung and smarted. Later they ached and throbbed. I used an axe to break up the ground and a shield to scoop the soil away. The earth tasted sour, worse than the salts from Carrod Springs.

  I buried Greyson first. I found a visored helm, scoured it out with sand, and put it on him to cover his face. ‘You be sure to grumble, wherever you find yourself, Sunny.’ Two shield-loads of dust and grit stole the detail from him. Just another corpse. Four more and he made little more than an undulation in the earth. Ten more and I smoothed the ground over.

  I set Lesha’s head against her neck. I felt it the right thing to do since I had separated them in the first place. The pieces didn’t seem to fit.

  ‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Lesha together again.’

  I sat beside the grave without looking at her, watching the sun drop toward the west. ‘These men, they weren’t any different to me and mine.’ My cuts stung and throbbed. I thought of how much hurt I’d escaped and the complaints went away. ‘Being at the sharp end of the stick changes your view on the business of poking, sure enough – you’d have to be pretty stupid not to see that one coming though.’ I stopped talking. It wasn’t so much that there wasn’t anyone to hear. When you’ve got death in you and you’re surrounded by corpses, well you’re always going to have some kind of an audience. It was more that what gripped me was too fluid, too uncertain to be captured and spoken. Words are blunt instruments, better suited to murder than to making sense of the world. I filled the grave. It was time.

  The sun clung to the horizon with crimson fingers. I straightened and paused mid-step. Red eyes watched me, the sky reflected in the gaze of the fallen. Too many heads lay turned my way for chance to have set their course. Coldness pulsed from the old wound in my chest, necromancy, a numbness like the ghouls’ darts brought, or a detachment maybe, as if some unseen hand were closing around me, walling away the world’s vitality. Close by, Rael lay, a knife in his throat, skewering the old scar where some past attempt had failed. I took my step and his eyes followed the motion.

  ‘Dead King.’ The words bubbled up, the blood so dark it ran purple over his teeth.

  ‘Hmmm.’ I picked up the sturdiest of the discarded axes. The Perros Viciosos had favoured axes. The heft of it held a certain comfort. A quick shake rid me of wearies and I set to my task. It’s hard work taking the limbs off a man. The legs especially take a lot of hacking, and flesh is much tougher stuff than you might imagine. As soon as you lose the edge on an axe it tends to bounce off a leather-clad thigh if your stroke is anything but perfect. With luck you’ll break the bone in any case, but to hew the whole limb off? Think cutting down trees: always far harder than you think it should be. By the end my breath came in gasps and sweat dripped from my nose. I settled for taking off hands and feet from the last ten men before collapsing in a cross-legged slump before Rael once more.

  ‘Life was much easier when death held on to what it was given,’ I said.

  I couldn’t tell if Rael still watched me but the Dead King’s presence lingered in the stink of old blood.

  ‘I’m thinking if you could stand these lads up again you would have done it by now, but better safe than sorry, neh?’

  Still nothing. The Dead King seemed to have Chella under his thumb, so that made his interest in me … unsettling.

  I leaned in over Rael’s corpse and rapped on his forehead. ‘Hello?’ Gathering my own traces of necromancy and reaching in didn’t seem like the best idea, rather like using your fingers to take a bone from a hungry dog.

  Nothing. Perhaps the king had a lot of dead eyes to peer out of – too many people to scare for more than a quick name check with each. I shrugged. At the bottom of it the Perros Viciosos weren’t any more frightening dead than alive. It didn’t mean I wanted to spend my night sleeping among them though. They surely smelled worse dead.

  I led Lesha’s horse away from the camp and settled a hundred yards off over a low ridge. Despite myself I slept poorly, haunted by Sunny’s screams and prodded awake by each small noise in the darkness.

  * * *

  Dawn found me back at the Bad Dogs’ camp. I blessed the Iberico’s poisons for the lack of flies and rats. What beauty there is to war is in the moment. After a day any battlefield is little more than carrion and scavengers. In the Iberico at least the carrion doesn’t swarm with flies. In fact, apart from my own indulgence with the axe, the dead looked untouched with only the occasional large and hardy cockroach digging in for breakfast.

  I collected my bits and pieces. Balky favoured me with a reproachful stare as I loaded him. I tethered the mule to Lesha’s stallion, and led them both off into the promised land.

  Without Lesha’s guidance I had nothing to stop me walking into the invisible fires that had scoured her so badly. We walk a knife-edge each day though, and most don’t know it – at least in the promised lands, in the Iberico, in Kane’s Scar and Ill-Shadow back in Ancrath, in such places there’s no pretence, no lie of safety, no deception that like the ancients’ song, ‘love is all you need’. At a single false step you can and will burn. As always.

  At times I let Lesha’s horse precede me, but horses like to be led and prodding him along made for slow going.

  The first time I saw it I wasn’t sure what my eyes were telling me. On a slope to our right a shoulder of weathered Builder-stone broke through the shale. Above and around it the air shimmered in a heat haze. The burned side of my face throbbed with it, and in the moment I closed that eye with wincing – the haze vanished. Looking once more, and only with the eye so nearly blinded when Gog burned me, I saw the shimmer again, like the ghosts of flame that had danced on Jane beneath Mount Honas.

  ‘Get along.’ I pulled Balky up on his tether. He let out a hee-haw loud enough to crack rocks. The notion to push him through that shimmer came and went. Other considerations aside, I’d have to carry my own kit. If one of those mouse-sized roaches had been handy I would have tossed that through. A stray thought occurred. I dug out the view-r
ing from my pack and held it up to watch the phenomenon through. In an instant, shades of red wrapped the world, painted in thick crimson around the shoulder of old stone, fading to less violent hues further down the slope. Along our path at the bottom of the dry valley the ring showed occasional regions of dull orange hanging mist-like.

  ‘Damn but that’s handy. What else can you show me?’

  And like the genie from Aladdin’s lamp, Fexler Brews stood before me on the road, no larger than life and no smaller. I took a step back, the kind of step that seeks no permission and springs from the days when men’s fear was written into the marrow of our race. The kind I always regret. I held the ring aside and Fexler vanished along with the shades of red and orange. Brought back and he returned with the ring.

  ‘What am I doing here, Brews?’ I felt silly talking to something seen only though a small loop of steel, even out in the wilds with none but horse and mule to watch me.

  Fexler spread his hands. He wore the same whites he had back at Castle Morrow, not a speck of dust on them.

  ‘Why the mystery? Just tell me plain and—’

  He turned and walked away down the valley.

  ‘Hell.’ And I followed, hauling Balky after.

  20

  Five years earlier

  Fexler Brews’ ghost led me through the Iberico Hills. We walked from well before noon until well after, long enough for me to grow weary and for the cuts on my back, just above my hip, to start with that nagging ache and heat that speaks of infection.

  The hills held every colour from bone-white through the greys to ochre. Baked mud, crumbling earth, exposed rock. And from time to time some rusting hulk, eroding in that stubborn way that Builder works have about them, refusing the elements century after century. Most of them blocks of metal with no hint of function, looking like steel, pocked and pitted, some large as houses, some askew as if pushed aside by giants, all stained with corrosion in trickled green and powder-white. We passed one that buzzed, a high whine that hurt my teeth, and Fexler vanished until it lay well behind me. In another place a leaning metal column, half-buried, or maybe nine-tenths buried, sang in a voice of staggering beauty and a language unknown to me. I stood with the sun’s heat beating against me and the hairs on end across my neck, just bathing in it.