Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3) Read online

  23

  We made progress, not good progress but enough. Sometimes the guard didn’t get their charges to Vyene on time, but it hadn’t happened in my lifetime. Even when a member of the Hundred died en route, their corpse would make a punctual arrival.

  When towns and villages lay at convenient points we spent the night in commandeered accommodation, otherwise tents were pitched in fields or clearings. I liked those nights best, Katherine and Miana lit by firelight in woods where cold mists threaded the trees, each woman framed by the fur trim of winter robes, all of us huddling close to the heat. Gomst and Osser in their chairs with wine goblets in hand debated as old men do, Makin and Marten kept by the queen ready to make up for my failings, Kent sat quiet, watching the night. Rike and Gorgoth bookended our little band, soaking up the warmth, both looking meaner than hell.

  On one such night, with the crackle of the fire and the glow of many others dotted about us through the wood, Miana said, ‘Jorg, you sleep so much better out of the Haunt, why is that?’ Her breath steamed before her in the night and though she faced me it was Katherine that she watched.

  ‘I’ve always loved the road, dear,’ I told her. ‘You leave your troubles behind you.’

  ‘Not if you bring your wife.’ Rike snorted and kept his gaze on the fire, immune to the sharp look Marten sent his way.

  ‘In the Haunt you always talked in your sleep.’ Miana turned to face Katherine now. ‘He practically raved. I had to set my bed in the east tower just to get some rest.’

  Katherine made no reply, her face still.

  ‘But now he sleeps like a sinless child, without murmur,’ Miana said.

  I shrugged. ‘Bishop Gomst is the one with night terrors. Should we worry when our holiest rest uneasy?’

  Miana ignored me. ‘No more “Sareth”, no more “Degran”, and no more endless “Katherine! Katherine!”’

  Katherine arched one eyebrow, delicate, expressive, and delicious. Miana had been irritable all day in the carriage, but then if I’d swallowed a whole baby and it insisted on kicking the hell out of my insides I might be less than my normal tolerant self.

  A stick popped with a loud retort, sending embers from the fire.

  Defence is always a weakness and I didn’t feel like attacking, so I waited. Katherine had so many options open to her – I wanted to know which she would take.

  ‘I trust King Jorg only called my name out in torment, Queen?’

  I wondered what her hands were doing under that fur wrap. Twisting? Sliding toward a knife? Still and collected?

  ‘It’s true.’ Miana smiled, quick and unexpected, her frown erased. ‘He never did seem pleased to see you.’

  Katherine nodded. ‘My nephew has many crimes to answer for, but the darkest are against my sister, Queen Sareth and her child. Perhaps as he says his sins are left behind on the road. Maybe when we stop at Vyene they will catch up with him once more.’

  None around the fire made any move to defend me from the charges.

  I spoke up for myself. ‘If there were any justice, lady, God himself would reach down and strike me dead, for I am guilty as you say. But until he does, I will just have to keep moving on and doing what I can in the world.’

  Gorgoth surprised me then, his voice so deep at first you might think it a trembling in the ground itself. It took me a moment to understand he had started to sing, something wordless, elemental like the crackle of the fire, and captivating. For the longest time we only sat and listened, the stars wheeling overhead, frosty in the night.

  For three nights and days rain thundered from leaden skies, drowning out conversation in the carriage and attempting to drown pretty much everything else outside. The roads before us became rivers of mud. The rivers themselves grew to dark and swirling monsters wielding trees and carts as they surged past. Captain Harran led his force along the alternative routes planned out against such eventualities, taking us through larger towns, through cities where the stone bridges had ridden out many a flood.

  I took to Brath’s saddle again. After days pressed against the warmth of Katherine’s cool indifference I could do with a cold shower.

  ‘Making your escape, Jorg?’ Makin rode up beside me as I pulled away from Holland’s carriage.

  The road led like a causeway through a sea of flooded pasture, the waters broken only by half-drowned hedgerows. Hours later the rain failed and the sky cracked open along a bright fault-line. The still waters all around became mirrors, every lone tree reflected, bare fingers reaching below as well as above. So much of the world is about surfaces, the eye deceived, with the truth in the unknown and unknowable depths beneath.

  ‘Damn.’ I shook my head. I’d come out of the carriage to think about something other than Katherine!

  ‘My lord?’ A guardsman close at hand.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said.

  ‘My lord, Captain Harran asks for you at the head of the column.’

  ‘Oh.’ An exchanged glance with Makin and we picked up the pace to pass those ahead, already slowing.

  In the west the sun started to edge beneath the cloud bank to tinge the floodwater crimson. We reached Harran after five minutes of mud and splatter. A small town lay ahead on a rise, an island for now.

  ‘Gottering.’ Harran nodded to the distant houses.

  Marten and Kent joined us.

  ‘Is the road impassable?’ I asked, the route dipped beneath the flood before rising again just as it entered Gottering.

  ‘It shouldn’t be too deep,’ Harran said. He leaned forward and touched his horse’s leg to indicate the level.

  ‘What then?’ I asked.

  Marten drew his sword, a slow action, and pointed to the fencing on our left. I had thought it the normal detritus that a flood will wad into any fence or decorate the bushes with, but a closer look told a different story.

  ‘Rags?’

  ‘Clothes,’ Harran said.

  Kent slipped from his horse and squelched a few steps forward along the road. Bending he retrieved a handful of mud. He held a grimy palm up to me.

  I’d noted the white specks but not really paid attention. Inches from my face I could see them for what they were. Teeth. People’s teeth, long-rooted and bloody.

  The waters burned red now with the sun drowning in the west. The air held a chill already.

  ‘And does this mean anything to you, Harran?’

  ‘The guard travel many places. I’ve heard stories.’ An old scar beneath his eye burned very white. I’d not noticed it before. Harran wore his years this evening. ‘Best get that bishop of yours here. He may have more to tell.’

  And so, minutes later, Makin returned with Gomst behind him in the saddle. And Kent who had gone to escort the bishop, not for safety but because of the piety that got burned into him at the Haunt, returned with Katherine.

  ‘You could have let the princess have your horse, Sir Kent. I’m sure she didn’t want to cuddle up to a crispy bloodhound like yourself.’

  ‘I wouldn’t let him wade after us in the mud.’ Katherine leaned around Kent’s shoulder and shot me a venomous look.

  ‘You showed Bishop Gomst your evidence then, Kent?’ I ignored Katherine. I could feel her daring me to say she should have stayed where she was.

  Makin let Gomst down on the verge where the ground rose to the ridge along which the fence ran.

  ‘This is a bad thing.’ Gomst staggered and almost slipped over on the wet grass before he reached the dark shrouding of rags. His hand kept questing for the support of his crook, left back atop Holland’s carriage. ‘Like St Anstals … I had a report.’ He patted his robes in search, then abandoned the effort. ‘And the ruin of Tropez.’ Wild eyes found me. ‘The Dead King’s work has been done here. Ghouls and rag-a-mauls if we’re lucky.’

  ‘And if we’re not so blessed, old man?’

  ‘Lichkin. There might be a lichkin.’ He couldn’t keep the terror from his voice.

  Harran nodded. ‘The monsters from the Is
les.’

  ‘Mother Ursula saw in visions that the lichkin would cross the waters. A dark tide would bear them.’ Gomst hugged himself against the cold. ‘They say that the lichkin have only one mercy.’

  ‘What mercy is that, your grace?’ Kent rasped.

  ‘In the end they let you die.’

  I looked over at the black shapes of Gottering, roofs, a church tower, chimneys, a tavern’s weather vane. It pays to choose your ground and I would rather choose the town than a thin strip of mud amid a vast lake. But had the enemy already chosen Gottering, already laid their traps? Or was too much being read into some rags and a scattering of teeth.

  ‘Count them,’ I said.

  ‘My lord?’ Harran frowned at me.

  ‘How many teeth, how much clothing? Did three peasants brawl here and bring the Gilden Guard to a halt, or is this the scene of a massacre?’

  Harran waved at two of his men and they climbed down to inspect more closely.

  I nudged Brath closer to the captain. ‘If it’s corpses we’re to fight, best to do it with our feet dry and space to see them coming. How deep is the water around us? I’d say two feet? Three? Not drowning deep? Even if the dead crawled through it a man might mark the ripples in their wake?’

  ‘Deeper in places,’ Harran said. Another captain disagreed. Harran and two more guard captains, Rosson and Devers, started to argue the lie of the land.

  Marten rode through a gap in the fence, down into the flood. He stood in his stirrups to face us in the gloom, the water lapping his toes. ‘It’s about this deep, sire.’

  ‘Dozens,’ said the man checking the fence, peeling the garments from it. ‘Scores maybe.’

  ‘We’ll stay here,’ I said. ‘And ride into Gottering with first light.’

  I accompanied Katherine and Gomst back to the carriage. ‘I’ll sleep in here tonight,’ I told Miana as she opened the door. ‘I want a sword close to you.’

  ‘I’ll marshal the guard around the carriage,’ Makin said from the saddle.

  ‘Put Kent on the roof. Rike and Gorgoth by the doors. Let Marten organize patrols through the fields. Better a drowned guardsman or two than being taken by surprise.’

  Cold woke me in the night. Even with Miana pressed against me beneath a bearskin throw, and with Katherine’s weight through the thickness of her own furs, the cold opened my eyes. The faint slosh of horses moving through the standing waters became a fractured sound, a brittle tinkling and a creaking. Ice.

  I leaned toward the nearer window, across Katherine, and found her watching me. In the dark her eyes made a gleam without colour. She drew aside the window cover and together we squinted through the perforations of the grille, the steam of our breath mixing.

  The screams started faint and grew no louder, but with each passing minute the horror mounted. Screams reaching across the skin of ice, all the way from the dark shapes of Gottering. I knew it for pain. Terror has a different quality and pain will scare away fear quick enough.

  ‘I should go out.’

  ‘Stay,’ she said.

  So I did.

  Katherine sat up, straight-backed against the cushioned rest. ‘Something’s coming.’ I reached for my sword – she shook her head. ‘Coming a different way.’

  For a moment, before she closed her eyes, I swear I saw them: green, grass-green, lit from within. She sat still, ice-still, painted in black and pale by moonlight through the window grille. I thought her perfect and need trembled in me. Screams I had heard before.

  She sat without motion as the long night marched past, her lips twitching with an occasional word, muttered and indistinct. Miana and the old men slept, uneasy in their dreams but not tormented, and I watched Katherine, listening to the distant howling, to the crackle of ice, and to the drawing of her breath.

  24

  We came into Gottering at first light. The water sloshed around the carriage floor at the deepest point and brought the smell of the river to us, but we didn’t have to get out.

  I climbed from the carriage in the town square, with the flood trickling down the step behind me. The place showed no signs of damage, a pleasant enough town in the most prosperous region of Attar. Bunting from the harvest festival still hung across the main street from rooftop to rooftop. A child’s hoop beside the carriage wheels. Birdsong.

  ‘Did it seem to the patrols that the screams came from town?’ I asked.

  Harran nodded. ‘Couldn’t be more than an hour since they stopped.’

  A sniff of the air spoke of rot and shit, cold against the sinuses, what you expect from any town. And something else.

  ‘Blood,’ I said. ‘There’s slaughter been done here. I can smell it.’

  ‘Search the houses.’ Harran waved his men on. Dozens of them set off, ducking through doorways, the dawn light gleaming on their mail.

  The first of the guard re-emerged within minutes. He held some kind of garment out before him, a pale and wrinkled thing, his face, almost as pale, kept stiff in a mask of revulsion.

  ‘Here!’ I called the man to me and put my hands out to inspect his prize.

  He placed it in my arms without waiting for further invitation.

  Even with it draped across my forearms, with the weight of it, the raw scent, and the faintly obscene warmth still clinging there, it took several moments before I understood what I held. It took an effort not to flinch and drop the thing in that instant of realization. I lifted it up, let the arms hang, the scalp flop.

  ‘It takes some skill to flay a man so completely,’ I said. I scanned the company, meeting the gaze of each soldier. ‘Terror is a weapon, gentlemen, and our enemy understands its use. Let’s be sure that we also understand this game.’

  I let the skin drop to the cobbles. A wet sound. ‘Find them all. Pile them here.’

  I rode the empty streets with Red Kent and Makin, circling the town at the water’s edge, finding nothing. By the time the sun cleared the rooftops Harran’s men had made a heap of one hundred and ninety skins, taken from cellars, bedrooms, stables, chairs before hearths, all across town. Each of a piece with just the three slices that a practised huntsman would use to take the hide from a deer. Men, women, young and old, children’s skins lay there, all faces wrinkled now. I picked up the hoop toy from by the carriage and fretted it through my fingers as the guard built the pile.

  Marten escorted Miana and Katherine from the carriage into the Red Fox Inn, Gottering’s only such establishment. Miana waddled, her belly impossibly large, discomfort written across her face. Marten saw them installed in cushioned chairs and kept their company while they waited, with a fire lit and guardsmen about them, Gorgoth at the door. Outside, Gomst read a benediction over the remains in the square. I trusted Katherine to maintain whatever wall she had erected to keep the lichkin out of our heads, but she would have to sleep eventually.

  ‘We should move on,’ Harran said, pulling his white mare to Brath’s side. ‘This is not our concern.’

  ‘It’s true. The Duke of Attar would not thank us for policing his lands on his behalf.’

  Harran pushed the gratitude from his face so fast many would have missed it.

  ‘Prepare to move out!’ he shouted.

  I would have been happy to ride on as well – but it felt like being pushed.

  Through the small leaded panes of the inn window, stained a faint green by the Attar glass, I saw Marten start to his feet and take Miana’s hand with concern.

  ‘However,’ I said. ‘Are you not expecting other guard troops to come this way? The flooding narrows the options for travelling from the west. How many of the Hundred are to follow in our wake?’

  ‘There may be some.’ Honour wouldn’t let him lie. A problem that never troubled me.

  ‘And aren’t the guard bound to the whole task, to getting the Hundred to Vyene, not just to those in their immediate charge?’

  Harran stood in his stirrups. ‘Strike that! I want the victims found. I want each house secured.’ With a grow
l he rode off to oversee.

  ‘Whoever has still to travel this way is unlikely to be voting in your favour at Congression.’ Osser Gant levered himself from the shadows of stable block, his gaunt frame supported on a silver-topped cane, a nice piece of work in the shape of a fox’s head.

  ‘So why am I reminding Harran of a duty he would rather have forgotten?’ I asked.

  Osser nodded. ‘And risking yourself.’

  ‘You’ve spent a lifetime on the edge of those stinking marshes, Gant. How many lichkin have you seen?’

  ‘An old man like me doesn’t stray far from his master’s hall, King Jorg. But you won’t meet many men who’ve seen a lichkin. You might find the corpse of a man who has seen one, and that corpse might try to kill you, but the man will be long gone.’ Osser nodded, as if agreeing with himself.

  ‘Not a one in all these years?’ I asked.

  ‘The lichkin may be old,’ Osser said. ‘I don’t know. But they’re new to the Ken Marshes. They’ve roamed there for ten years at most. Maybe not much more than five years. Even in the Isles they are a new plague.’

  Marten came to the inn’s door and beckoned to me. Something important. Sometimes you just know. I swung out of my saddle and stepped down. Walking after an age in the saddle puts an unfamiliar edge on something you do every day of your life – just for a moment as your leg muscles remember how they were made. I opted for a slow crossing of the square. Something told me it might be a short walk but it was taking me a long way.

  Marten leaned in close. ‘I think it’s her time. Sarah was like this.’

  ‘She can’t wait?’ I said. ‘Hold it in?’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that, Jorg.’ The flickered hint of a smile.

  ‘Hell.’ I raised my voice. ‘I want more guards around this inn. Secure all the exits.’

  I peered through a glass pane. Miana had stretched back in her chair, Katherine in close, blocking my view. I didn’t want to go in. There was a time when I was pleased to find that something still scared me. As the years stacked up I kept finding new things to worry over. Pleasure turning to dismay. It seems men have far more to fear than boys.