King of Thorns be-2 Page 17

  I left Makin still arguing and the others slinking around like whipped dogs. Well, not Red Kent. He had his new axe. Not a new one in truth but a fine one, forged in the high north and traded from the long-ships off Karlswater. Kent raised the axe to me as I left, nodded, and said nothing.

  Gorgoth and Gog waited for me at the Duke’s storerooms, a sack of provisions between them and waxed blankets in case we needed shelter on the slopes.

  We set off for the Heimrift with a fine spring morning breaking out all around us. We all walked. I’d grown used to Brath and had no desire to leave him untended on the side of a volcano. For all I knew trolls were partial to horsemeat. I quite like it myself.

  Sindri caught us half a mile down the road, his plaits bouncing off his back as he cantered along.

  “Not this time, Sindri, just me and the pretty boys here,” I said.

  “You’ll want me until you’re clear of the forest.”

  “The forest? We had no problems before,” I said.

  “I watched you.” Sindri grinned. “If you had gone wrong I would have guided you. But you were lucky.”

  “And what should I be scared of in the forest?” I asked. “Green trolls? Goblins? Grendel himself? You Danes have more boogie-men than the rest of the empire put together.”

  “Pine men,” he said.

  “How do they burn?” I asked.

  He laughed at that, then let the smile fall from him. “There’s something in the forest that lets the blood from men and replaces it with pine sap. They don’t die, these men, but they change.” He pointed to his eyes. “The whites turn green. They don’t bleed. Axes don’t bother them.”

  I pursed my lips. “You can guide us. I’m busy today. These pine men will have to come to the Highlands and get in line if they want a part of me.”

  And so we walked, with Sindri leading his horse, along the forest paths he judged safe, and we watched the trees with new suspicions.

  By noon the woods thinned and gave over to rising moorland. We marched through waist-deep bracken, thick with stands of gorse scratching as we passed, and everywhere heather, trying to trip us, clouds of pollen blazing our trail.

  Sindri didn’t have to be told to leave. “I’ll wait here,” he said, and nestled back in the bracken on a slope that caught the sun. “Good luck with Ferrakind. If you kill him you’ll have at least one friend in the north. Probably a thousand!”

  “I’m not here to kill him,” I said.

  “Probably for the best,” Sindri said.

  I frowned at that. If I’d had three brothers die in the Heimrift then I would have an account to settle with the man who ruled there. The Danes though seemed to think of Ferrakind in the same terms as the volcanoes themselves. To take issue with him would be the same as feuding against a cliff because your friend fell off it.

  I took us back to Halradra, along the paths and slopes that we first followed. As we gained height the wind picked up and took the sweat from us. The sun stayed bright and it seemed a good day. If this was to be our last one then at least it had been pretty so far. We trailed along a long valley of black ash and broken lava flows, ancient currents still visible in the frozen rock. Far above us a lone herders’ hut stood dwarfed by the vast heave of the mountains around it, built in days when grass must have found a way to grow here. Unseen in the blue heavens a cloud passed before the sun and its shadow rippled across the expanse of silent sunlit rock arrayed east to west. Gorgoth made a deep sound in his chest. I liked that about travelling with Gorgoth. He hoarded his words, so you wouldn’t know his thoughts from one moment to the next, but he never missed anything, not even those rare occasions when the myriad parts of this dirty, worn-out world of ours come into some fleeting alignment that constructs a beauty so fierce it hurts to see.

  Where Gorgoth held his silence, Gog normally provided enough chatter for two. In the most part I would let it flow over me. Children prattle. It is their nature and it is mine to let it slide. Climbing Halradra for the second time though, Gog said nothing. After so many weeks of, “Why do horses have four legs, Brother Jorg?” “What colour is green made from, Brother Jorg?” “Why is that tree taller than the other one, Brother Jorg?” you would think I’d appreciate a rest from it, but in truth it grated more when he said nothing.

  “No questions today, Gog?” I asked.

  “No.” He shot me a glance then looked away.

  “Nothing?” I asked.

  We carried on up the slope without speaking. I knew it wasn’t just fear that kept his tongue. As a child there’s a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one…each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.

  Gog didn’t want to ask his questions because he didn’t want to hear me lie.

  We came to the caves that I had failed to see before, wrinkled our noses at the troll stink, and passed on into the darkness.

  “Some light if you will, Gog,” I said.

  He opened his hand and fire blossomed as if he’d been holding it in his fist all along.

  I led the way, through the great hall of the entrance cave, along the smooth passage rising for fifty yards to the cathedral cave, almost spherical with its potholed floor and sculpted walls.

  The trolls came quickly this time, a half dozen of them insinuating themselves into the shadowed circle around Gog’s flame. Gorgoth stood ready to set his strength against any of the new ones who doubted him, but they crouched and watched us, watched Gorgoth, and made no attacks.

  “Why are we here?” Gorgoth asked at last. I had wondered if he would ever crack.

  “I’ve chosen my ground,” I said. “If you have to meet a lion then it’s better if it isn’t in his den.”

  “You didn’t look anywhere else,” Gorgoth said.

  “I found what I wanted here.”

  “And what’s that?” he asked.

  “A faint hope.” I grinned and squatted down to be level with Gog. “We have to meet him sometime, Gog. This problem of yours, these fires, they’re going to pull you down sooner or later, and there’s nothing I can do, not even Gorgoth can help you, and the next time will be worse and the next worse still.” I didn’t lie to him. He didn’t want to hear me lie.

  A tear rolled down his cheek then sputtered into steam. I took his hand, very small in mine, and pressed the stolen rune stone into his palm, closing his fingers about it. “You and I, Gog, we’re the same. Fighters. Brothers. We’ll go in there together and come out together.” And we were the same, all lying aside. Underneath it, brushing away the goodness in him, the evil in me, we had a bond. I needed to see him win through. Nothing selfless about it. If Gog could outlast what ate him from the inside out, then maybe I could too. Hell, I didn’t come halfway across the empire to save a scrawny child. I came to save me.

  “We’re going to call Ferrakind to us,” I said. I glanced at the trolls. They watched me with wet black eyes, no reaction to Ferrakind’s name. “Do they even understand what I’m saying?”

  “No,” said Gorgoth. “They’re wondering if you’d be good to eat.”

  “Ask them if there other ways out of here, ones that lead out higher up the mountain.”

  A pause. I strained to hear what passed between them and heard nothing but the flutter of Gog’s flame.

  “They can take us to one,” Gorgoth said.

  “Tell them Ferrakind is going to come. Tell them to hide close by but be ready to lead us out by one of these other paths.”

  I could tell when Gorgoth’s thoughts hit them. They were on their feet in a moment, black mouths stretched in silent snarls and roars, black tongues lashing over their jagged teeth. Quicker than they appeared th
ey were gone, lost in the darkness.

  “Right, we’re going to call Ferrakind. I’m going to try to get him to help us.” I steered Gog’s face away from the entrance and back to mine. “If things go badly I want you to do the trick we saw in the Duke’s hall. If Ferrakind tries to burn us, I want you to take the fire and put it where I show you.”

  “I’ll try,” Gog said.

  “Try hard.” I’d been scared of burning all my life, since the poker, maybe before that even. I thought of Justice howling as he burned in chains. Sour vomit bubbled at the back of my throat. I could walk away from this. I could just walk.

  “How will we make him come here, Brother Jorg?” Gog’s first question of the day.

  The vision of me walking down the slope still filled my eyes. I would whistle in the spring sunshine and smile. Sweat trickled from beneath my arms, cool across my ribs. If Makin were here he would say he had a bad feeling about this. He’d be right too.

  I could just leave. I could just leave.

  If Coddin were here he would call this too great a risk with no certain reward. He would say that but he would mean “Get the hell out of there, Jorg,” because he wouldn’t want me to burn.

  And if my father were here. If he saw me stepping toward the sunlight. Taking the easy path. He would say in a voice so soft that you might almost miss it, “One more, Jorg. One more.” And at each crossroad thereafter I would choose the easy path one more time. And in the end what I loved would still burn.

  “Make a fire, Gog,” I said. “Make the biggest fucking fire in the world.”

  Gog looked at Gorgoth, who nodded and stepped back. For a long moment, measured by half a dozen slow-drawn breaths, nothing happened. Faint at first, as if it were imagination, the flame patterns on Gog’s back started to flicker and move. The colour deepened. Flushes of crimson ran through him and the ash grey paled. The heat reached me and I stepped back, then back again. The shadows had run from the cavern but I had no time to see what they revealed. Gog pulsed with heat like an ember in the smith’s fire pulses with each breath of the bellows. Gorgoth and I retreated into the tunnel that led up from behind the cathedral cave. We stood with the heat of Gog’s fire burning on our faces and the air rolling down from behind us icy on our necks.

  The flames came without sound and the whole of the cathedral cave filled with swirling orange fire. We staggered back, losing sight of the cavern but still blistered by the inferno. My breath came in gasps as if the fire had burned out what I needed from the air.

  “How will this help?” Gorgoth asked.

  “There’s only one fire.” I drew in a lungful of hot and useless air. Black dots swam across my vision. “And Ferrakind watches through it as if it were a window to all the world.”

  Gorgoth caught my shoulder and stopped me falling. It seemed to take no effort and I managed a small pang of resentment at that even as I began to slip into a darker place where his hand could not support me. I could hear nothing but my own gasps and the sound of my heels dragging as he pulled me farther back, farther up. Most of me felt hot enough to ignite spontaneously, but strangely my feet were freezing.

  The fire that had made no sound as it came gave a distinct whumpf as it went out. It ended before I passed out entirely, and a shock of cold brought me round with a hoarse curse.

  “What the hell?” I lay in a small stream of icy water. The tunnel had been dry before, yet now a stream ran along it, rattling pebbles in its flow. I rolled in the freezing trickle for good measure then used the wall to get myself vertical. Gorgoth led the way back. He’d spent a lifetime in the dark beneath Mount Honas and his cat’s eyes found him good footing whilst I stumbled behind. The little stream followed us back into the cathedral chamber where it bubbled and steamed on the hot rocks.

  Gog waited where we had left him, still glowing, and Ferrakind stood at the mouth of the tunnel that led to the entrance chamber.

  I had thought to find a man with fire in him. Ferrakind was more of a fire with a touch of man remaining. He stood in the form of a man but as if fashioned from molten iron such as runs from the vats of Barrow and of Gwangyang. Every part of him burned and his whole shape flickered from one posture to another. When his eyes, like hot white stars, glanced my way his gaze seared my skin.

  “To me, Gog!” It hurt to shout, but the steam from the meltwater around my feet helped a little.

  “The child is mine.” Ferrakind spoke in the crackle of his flames.

  Gog scrambled toward us. Ferrakind made a slow advance.

  “And why would you want him?” I called. I couldn’t get any closer without the skin melting off me.

  “The big fire consumes the small. We will join and our strength will multiply,” Ferrakind said.

  It seemed to me as if he spoke from memory, using what parts of the man had yet to burn away.

  “We came to save him from that,” I said. “Can’t you take the fire from him and leave the boy behind?”

  Those hot eyes found me again and stared as if truly seeing me for the first time. “I know you.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. My lips felt too dry for the foolish words I might have found in other circumstances.

  “You woke a fire of an old kind that hasn’t burned for a thousand years,” Ferrakind said.

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “That.”

  “You brought the sun to earth,” Ferrakind’s crackle softened as if awed by the memory of the Builders’ weapon. Shadows ran across him.

  Gog reached us, the heat gone from him leaving new markings, bright flames caught in orange across his back, chest, arms.

  “So can you change him? Can you take the fire out of him, or enough so he can live with it?” I asked. It still hurt to breathe and the steam from the meltwater made it hard to see. Somewhere above and behind us the heat from Gog and Ferrakind was meeting the ancient ice at Halradra’s core.

  Ferrakind’s fire guttered and spurted, flowing over the cavern floor. I realized he was laughing.

  “The Builders tried to break the barriers between thought and matter,” he said. “They made it easier to change the world with a desire. They thinned the walls between life and death, between fire and not-fire, whittled away at the difference between this and that, even here and there.”

  It occurred to me that Ferrakind’s sanity had been one of the first things to be consumed in his own personal inferno. “Can you help the boy?” I asked, coughing.

  “It’s written in him. His thoughts touch fire. Fire touches his mind. He is fire-sworn. We can’t change how we’re written.” Ferrakind stepped toward us, flames rising around him like wings readying for flight. “Give me the boy and you may leave.”

  “I’ve come too far for ‘no,’” I said.

  Fire isn’t patient. Fire does not negotiate. I should have known these things.

  Ferrakind reached toward us and a column of white flame erupted from his hands. I had considered myself quick, but Gog moved quicker than I could think and caught the conflagration in his arms, his body shading from orange toward white-heat, but none of it reaching Gorgoth or me.

  “Behind us!” I shouted. “Send it back.”

  And Gog obeyed. The tunnel behind us filled with Ferrakind’s white fire as Gog caught it on one hand and threw it away from the other. I could see nothing of the fire-mage, just the white inferno boiling off him, and nothing of the tunnel, just a fierce tornado of white fire swirling away through it, up. We stood in a cocoon with furnace heat on every side and one small boy keeping our flesh from charring to the bone.

  For an age we saw nothing but blinding heat, heard nothing but the roar of fire. And each moment that I thought it could last no longer, the fury built. Gog blazed, first the bright orange of iron ready for the hammer, then the white of the furnace fire, then a pure white like starshine. I could see the shadows of his bones, clearer by the heartbeat, as if fire were burning though him, taking substance from muscle, skin, and fat. Leaving him brittle and ashen.
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br />   And in an instant the fire and fury fell away revealing Ferrakind, white-hot and molten, with Gog crouched, pale as silvery ash, unmoving.

  A torrent of meltwater rushed around us now, hip deep, white, and roaring, pouring into the main chamber through a tunnel mouth that lay dry and gritty when we first scrambled through it to escape the fire. The waters divided around Gog and again around Ferrakind as if unable to touch the essence of fire. Gorgoth and I kept close to Gog and the water hardly reached us.

  Ferrakind laughed again, new pulses of flame rising from him. “You thought to quench me, Jorg of Ancrath?”

  I shrugged. “It’s the traditional way. Fighting fire with fire doesn’t seem to have worked.” Already the flow around us had started to slacken.

  “It would take an ocean!” Ferrakind said. He gathered fire into his hands and let it blaze white. “The child is done. Time to die, Jorg of Ancrath.”

  If it were time then so be it. I had a faint hope, but it had only ever been that. At least it wouldn’t be a slow fire. I drew my sword. I always thought I would have a blade in hand when the time came.

  I heard a roar, but not the roar of flame, somehow deeper and more distant.

  It would take an ocean.

  “How about a lake?” I asked and sighted along my sword at the burning mage.

  “A lake?” Ferrakind paused.

  The waters hit then, a black wall rushing down on the heels of the trickle around our feet. I dived at Gog, carrying him with me into the cathedral cavern, rolling to the side of the tunnel mouth. He broke as though he were made of glass. He shattered like a toy, into a thousand sharp and brilliant pieces. I felt the sudden flash of heat. Needles of fire pierced my cheek where I hit him, my jaw, my temple. I lay amongst the scintillating shards, Gog’s remains, paralysed by a whole world of pain, curled on the gritty cavern floor with a flood of biblical proportions blasting its way out of the tunnel just yards behind me.

  In Halradra’s crater a thousand times a thousand tons of ice have lain for hundreds of years. But before that, in the distant long ago, waters flowed. How else would these tunnels be smooth, be strewn with grit and ancient mud, be scoured and potholed like the stone where rivers flow? With glacial slowness the ice has crept where underground streams carved hidden cathedrals and long galleries, and Halradra has slept, ice-choked and silent.