Prince of Thorns tbe-1 Read online

  “My father asked for Gelleth,” I said. “He did not specify the nature of its delivery. If I hand him a smoking ruin, he will thank me for it, by God he will. Do you think there is a crime he would not countenance to secure his borders? Even one crime? Any single sin?”

  Makin frowned. “And if the fumes roll into Ancrath?”

  “That,” I said, “is a risk that I am prepared to accept.”

  Makin turned from me, his hand on his sword hilt.

  “What?” I questioned his back, and my voice echoed in the Builders’ dusty vault. I spread my arms. “What? And don’t you dare speak to me of innocents. It is late in the day for Sir Makin of Trent to champion maids and babes in arms.” My anger sprang from more than Makin’s doubt. “There are no innocents. There is success, and there is failure. Who are you to tell me what can be risked? We weren’t dealt a hand to win with in this game, but I will win though it beggar heaven!”

  The tirade left me breathless.

  “But it’d be so many, Jorth,” Elban said.

  You’d think seeing me knife Brother Gemt not so many weeks earlier, over a far smaller dispute, would have taught them sense, but no.

  “One life, or ten thousand, I can’t see the difference. It’s a currency I don’t understand.” I set my sword to Elban’s neck, drawing too quick for him to react. “If I take your head once, is that less bad than taking it again, and then again?”

  But I had no appetite for it. Somehow losing the Nuban had made what brothers I had left seem more worth keeping, scum though they were.

  I put the blade away. “Brothers,” I said. “You know it’s not like me to lose my temper. I’m out of sorts. Too long without sight of the sun perhaps, or maybe something I ate . . .” Rike smirked at the reference to the necromancer’s heart. “You’re right, Makin, to destroy more than the Castle Red would be . . . wasteful.”

  Makin turned to face me, hands together now. “As you say, Prince Jorg.”

  “Little Rikey, get you just one of those wonderful toys. That one, like a giant’s gonad, if you please.” I pointed out the closest of the spheres. “Don’t drop it mind, and have Gorgoth help out if it’s as heavy as it looks. We’ll take it up a little higher and set it cooking for the castle’s breakfast. One should be enough.”

  And we did.

  With hindsight, if all the detail were known, Makin’s stand there in the Builders’ vault should be sufficient to wash the blood from his hands, to erase all his crimes, the cathedral at Wexten notwithstanding, and make of him a hero fit to stand beside any that may be found in legend. Given the swathe of death downwind of the Castle Red, it’s clear that the drastic scaling-down of my original plan saved the world from a rather unpleasant death. Or at least delayed it.

  35

  “We should have seen something by now,” Makin said.

  I looked back over my shoulder. The ugly bulk of Mount Honas made a black fist against the sky, the Castle Red cradled in its grip. Behind us the brothers straggled, a line of vagabonds labouring down the slope.

  “This death walks softly, Makin,” I said. “An invisible hand with fatal fingers.” I gave him a grin.

  “Finding every baby in its crib?” Distaste thinned Makin’s thick lips.

  “Would you rather it were Rike that found them, or Row?” I asked. I set a hand to his shoulder, gauntlet to breastplate, both smeared with the grey mud from our escape tunnel. He had it in his hair too, drying on black curls.

  “You seem troubled of late, old friend,” I said. “The past sins weigh so heavy that you’re afraid to add more?”

  I noticed that we stood nearly of a height, though Makin was a tall man. Another year’s growth and he’d be tilting his head to meet my gaze.

  “Sometimes you almost fool me, you’re that good, Jorg.” He sounded weary. I could see the web of fine lines around the corners of his eyes. “We’re not old friends. A little over three years ago you were ten. Ten! Maybe we’re friends, I can’t tell, but ‘old’? No.”

  “And what is it that I’m so good at?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Playing a role. Filling in for lost years with that intuition of yours. Replacing experience with genius.”

  “You think I have to be old to think with an old head?” I asked.

  “I think you need to have lived more to truly know a man’s heart. You need to have made more transactions in life to know the worth of the coin you spend so freely.” Makin turned to watch the column close on us.

  Rike came into view at the rear of the line, cresting a ridge, black against a dawn-pale sky. Behind him the clouds ran out in ribbons, the dirty purple of a fresh bruise, reaching for the west. Bandages on his upper arm, and around his brow, flapped in the breeze.

  Something tickled at me, the ghosts of whispers, colder than the wind.

  Makin turned to go.

  “Wait—”

  Screams now. The terror of those already dead.

  No sound came, but Mount Honas lifted, like a giant drawing breath. A light woke beneath the rock, bleeding incandescence through spreading fissures. In one moment, the mountain vanished, thrown at heaven in a spiralling inferno. And, somewhere within that gyre, every stone of the Castle Red, from deepest vault to tower high.

  A brilliance took all glory from the morning, making a pale wash of the land. Rike became a flicker of shadow against the blinding sky. I felt the hot kiss of that distant fury, like sunburn on my cheeks.

  What burns so bright cannot endure. The light failed, leaving us in shadow, the kind of darkness that precedes a squall. I saw the storm’s outriders, newborn ghosts, driven before the rage. I watched them sweep out across the land, like the ripple from a pond-thrown stone, a grey ring where rock became dust, racing fast as thought. The sky rippled too, the ribbon-cloud now whips for the cracking.

  “Dear Jesu.” Makin left his mouth open, though he had no more words.

  “Run!” Burlow’s shout sounded oddly mute.

  “Why?” I spread my arms to welcome the destruction. We had nowhere to run.

  I watched the brothers fall. Time ran slow and the blood pulsed cold in my veins. Between two beats of my heart, the blast cut them all down, Rike first, lost beneath the grey maelstrom, a child before an ocean breaker. The hot wind took my feet. I felt the dead flow through me, and tasted the bitter gall of necromancer blood once more.

  For a time I floated, like smoke above the slaughter.

  I lay in nothing. I knew nothing. A peace deeper than sleep, until . . .

  “Oh! Bravo!” The voice cut into me, too close, and somehow familiar. “Now is the winter of our Hundred War made fearsome summer by this prodigal son.” His words flowed like rhyme, and carried strange accents.

  “You maul Shakespeare worse than you abuse his mother tongue, Saracen.” This a woman, velvet and rich.

  Just run.

  “He has woken a Builders’ Sun, and you make jokes?” A child spoke, a girl.

  “You’re not dead yet, child? With the mountain levelled into the valley?” The woman sounded disappointed.

  “Forget the girl, Chella. Tell me who stands behind this boy. Has Corion grown weary of Count Renar and taken a new piece to the board? Or has the Silent Sister shown her hand at last?”

  Sageous! I knew him.

  “She thinks to win the game with this half-grown child?” The woman laughed.

  And I knew her too. The necromancer.

  “I sent you to Hell, with the Nuban’s bolt through your heart, bitch,” I said.

  “What in Kali’s n—”

  “He hears us?” She cut across him, Chella, I knew her voice, the only corpse ever to make me rise.

  I hunted for them, there in the smoke.

  “No, it’s not possible,” Sageous said. “Who stands behind you, boy?”

  I could find nothing in the swirl of blindness enfolding me.

  “Jorg?” A whisper at my ear. The girl again. The monsters’ glowing child.

  “Jane?�
� I whispered back, or thought I did, I couldn’t feel my lips or any other part of me.

  “The ether doesn’t hide us,” she said. “We are the ether.”

  I thought on that for a moment. “Let me see you.”

  I willed it. I reached for them. “Let me see you.” Louder this time. And I painted their image on the smoke.

  Chella appeared first, lean and sensual as I first met her, the coils of her body-art spiralled from etheric wisps. Sageous next. He watched me with those mild eyes of his, wider and more still than mill-pools, as I cut his form from nothing. Jane stepped out beside him, her glow faint now, a mere glimmer beneath the skin. There were others, shapes in the mist, one darker than the rest, his shape half-known, familiar. I tried to see him, poured my will into it. The Nuban came to mind, the Nuban, the glimpse of my hand on a door, and the sensation of falling into space. Déjà vu. “Who lends you this power, Jorg?” Chella smiled seduction at me. She stepped around me, a panther at play.

  “I took it.”

  “No,” Sageous shook his head. “This game has played out too long for trickery. All the players are known. The watchers too.” He nodded toward Jane.

  I ignored him, and kept my eyes on Chella. “I brought the mountain down on you.”

  “And I am buried. What of it?” An edge of her true age crept into her voice.

  “Pray I never dig you out,” I said.

  I looked to Jane. “So you’re buried too?”

  For a moment her glow flickered, and I saw another Jane in her place, this one a broken thing. A rag doll held between shards of rock in some dark place where she alone gave light. Bones stood from her hip and shoulder, very white, traced with blood, black in the faint illumination. She turned her head a fraction, and those silver eyes met mine. She flickered again, whole once more, standing before me, free and unharmed.

  “I don’t understand.” But I did.

  “Poor sweet Jane.” Chella circled the girl, never coming too close.

  “She’ll die clean,” I said. “She’s not afraid to go. She’ll take that path you fear so much. Cling to carrion flesh and rot in the bowels of the earth if that’s where cowardice keeps you.”

  Chella hissed, venom on her face, the wet flap of decay in her lungs. The smoke began to take her again, writhing around her in serpent coils.

  “Kill this one slow, Saracen.” She threw Sageous a hard look. And she was gone.

  I felt Jane at my side. The light had left her. Her skin held the colour of fine ash when the fire has taken all there is to give. She spoke in a whisper. “Look after Gog for me, and Gorgoth. They’re the last of the leucrota.”

  The thought of Gorgoth needing a guardian brought sharp words to the tip of my tongue, but I swallowed them. “I will.” Maybe I even meant it.

  She took my hand. “You can win the victories you seek, Jorg. But only if you find better reasons to want them.” I felt a tingle of her power through my fingers. “Look to the lost years, Jorg. Look to the hand upon your shoulder. The strings that lead you . . .”

  Her grip fell away, and smoke coiled where she had been.

  “Don’t come home again, Prince Jorg.” Sageous made his threat sound like fatherly advice.

  “If you start running now,” I said, “I might not catch you.”

  “Corion?” He looked into the coiling ether behind me. “Don’t send this boy against me. It would go ill.”

  I reached for my sword, but he’d gone before I cleared scabbard. The smoke became bitter, catching at my throat, and I found myself coughing.

  “He’s coming round.” I heard Makin’s voice as if from a great distance.

  “Give him more water.” I recognized Elban’s lisp.

  I struggled up, choking and spitting water. “God’s whore!”

  A vast cloud, like the anvil of a thunderhead, stood where Mount Honas had been.

  I blinked and let Makin haul me to my feet. “You’re not the only one to take a hard knock.” He nodded across to where Gorgoth crouched a few yards off, with his back to us.

  I stumbled over, stopping when I noticed the heat—the heat and a glow that made a silhouette of Gorgoth despite the daylight, as if he were huddled over a fierce campfire. I edged around and to the side. Gog lay coiled like a babe in the womb, every inch of him white hot, as if the light of the Builders’ Sun were bleeding through him. Even Gorgoth had to shuffle back.

  As I watched, the boy’s skin shaded down through colours seen in iron in the forge, hot orange, then the duller reds. I took a step toward him and he opened his eyes, white holes into the centre of a sun. He gasped, the inside of his mouth molten, then curled more tightly. At times fire danced across his back, running along his arms, then guttering out. It took ten minutes for Gog to cool so that his old colours returned and a man could stand beside him.

  At last he lifted his head and grinned. “More!”

  “You’ve had enough, lad,” I said. I didn’t know what the Builders’ Sun had woken as it echoed through him, but from what I’d seen, better it went back to sleep.

  I looked back at the cloud still rising above Mount Honas and the countryside burning for miles around.

  “I think it’s time to go home, lads.”

  36

  Four years earlier

  “It can’t be done,” said the Nuban.

  “Few things worth having can be got easily,” I said.

  “It can’t be done,” he said. “Not by anyone who expects to live five minutes past the act.”

  “If a suicidal assassin were all it took, then the Hundred would be the Dozen by now.” My own father had survived several attempts in which the would-be killer had no interest in escape. “No one with a claim to the empire throne is that easy to bring to an end.”

  The Nuban turned in the saddle to frown at me. He’d given up asking how a child knew such things. I wondered how long before he gave up telling me it couldn’t be done.

  I nudged my horse on. The towers of the Count’s castle hadn’t seemed to get any closer over the last half hour.

  “We need to find the Count’s strongest defence,” I said. “The protection that he most relies upon. The one upon which his faith rests.”

  The Nuban frowned again. “Seek out your enemy’s weakness,” he said. “Then take your shot.” He patted the heavy crossbow strapped across his saddlebags.

  “But you’ve already told me it can’t be done,” I said. “Repeatedly.” I pulled my cloak tight against the evening wind. The man I had taken it from had been a tall one, and it hung loose about me. “So you’re just planning the most sensible way to lose.”

  The Nuban shrugged. He never argued for the sake of being right. I liked that in him.

  “The weakest spot in a good defence is designed to fail. It falls, but in falling it summons the next defence and so on. It’s all about layers. At the end of it all you’ll find yourself facing the thing you sought to avoid all along, only now you’re weaker, and it’s forewarned.”

  The Nuban said nothing, the blackness of his face impenetrable in the dying light.

  “Surprise is our only real weapon here. We sidestep that process of escalation. We cut straight to the heart of the matter.”

  And the heart is what we want to cut.

  We rode on, and at length the towers grew closer, and taller, and loomed until the castle gates yawned before us. A sprawl of buildings pooled before them like vomit—taverns and tanneries, hovels and whorehouses.

  “Renar’s shield is a man named Corion.” The Nuban twitched his nose at the stench as the horses threaded a path to the gates. “A magician from the Horse Coast, they say. Certainly a good councillor. He has the Count guarded by mercenaries from his homeland. Men with no families to threaten, and an honour code that keeps them true.”

  “So, what could get us an invitation to see this Corion, I wonder?”

  The queue at the gates moved in fits and starts, but never above a snail’s pace. Ten yards ahead of us a peasant wi
th an ox in tow argued with a guard in the Count’s livery.

  “Is he really a magician, do you think?” I watched the Nuban for his answer.

  “The Horse Coast is the place for them.”

  The peasant seemed to have won his case, and moved on with his ox, into the outer yard where the market stalls would still be set out.

  By the time we reached the gate a light rain had started to fall. The guard’s plume drooped somewhat in the drizzle, but there was nothing tired about the look he gave us.

  “What’s your business in the castle?”

  “Supplies.” The Nuban patted his saddlebags.

  “Out there.” The guard nodded to the sprawl before the gates. “You’ll find all you want out there.”

  The Nuban pursed his lips. The castle market would have the best goods, but that line wasn’t going to carry us far. We’d need a better reason before the Count’s man was going to let a road-worn Nuban mercenary across his master’s threshold.

  “Give me your bow,” I said to the Nuban.

  He frowned. “You’re going to shoot him?”

  The guard laughed, but there wasn’t an ounce of humour in the Nuban. He was getting to know me.

  I held out my hand. The Nuban shrugged and hauled his crossbow up from where it hung behind his saddle. The weight of it nearly took me to the ground. I had to grab the bow in both hands and cling to my mount with my legs but I managed the feat without too great a loss of dignity.

  I offered it to the guard.

  “Take this to Corion,” I said. “Tell him we’re interested in selling.”

  Irritation, scorn, amusement, I could see them all fighting to put the next words on his tongue, but he raised a hand for the weapon even so.

  I pulled the bow back as the guard reached up. “Be careful, half the weight is enchantments.” That lifted his brow an inch. He took it gingerly, eyeing the iron faces of Nuban gods. Something he saw there seemed to set aside his objections.

  “Watch these two,” he said, calling another man from the shadows of the gatehouse. And off he went, holding the Nuban’s crossbow before him as if it might bite given half a chance.