Emperor of Thorns Read online

  I went back to Osser. Makin finished tending his horse and came across with Kent to join us.

  ‘And how many lichkin are there, Chancellor Gant?’ I asked.

  ‘I heard tell there were seven in all the world,’ Kent said, his gaze flicking to the bishop praying before the mounded skins. ‘Seven is too many.’

  ‘There may be seven,’ Osser said. ‘The bishop has a list of seven names written by the sisters of the Helskian Order.’

  ‘I thought the Pope called for all the seers to be killed. She said the nunneries weren’t built to shelter witches.’ The decree had stuck with me – an example of the lengths to which the Vatican would go in order to avoid unwelcome facts.

  ‘Her Holiness called for the sisters of Helsk to be blinded,’ said Father Gomst, having finished or abandoned his prayers. ‘And they were blinded. But their visions continue.’

  A glance toward the inn’s window revealed little but Marten staring out. Katherine moved across the room with a steaming bowl and a cloth over one arm, becoming lost behind Marten’s broad shoulders.

  Rike returned to the main square, a black oak coffer under one arm overflowing with silverware and fine silk. A few of the guards stationed at the entry points gave him disapproving stares but none went as far as to challenge him. Gold armour or not, I would be surprised if any professional soldier would turn down a choice piece of loot when searching Gottering. Even so, something was wrong with the picture. I pursed my lips and frowned.

  ‘Brother Rike.’ He walked over, sullen despite his takings.

  I reached out and plucked at the silk, a lustrous orange I’d not encountered before. ‘What is it with you and fabric, Rike? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you leave a burning building without a bolt of stolen cloth. Something you’re not telling us?’ The idea of Rike in a dress painted as nasty a picture as the heaped skins. But that wasn’t the problem. The answer struck me. ‘You can carry more than that.’ When did I last see Rike stop looting before the weight of his takings made it impossible to gather any more?

  Rike shrugged and spat, colour coming to his face. ‘I’d had enough.’

  ‘You never have enough, Brother Rike.’

  ‘It’s the eyes.’ He spat again and started to tie the coffer to his horse. ‘I don’t mind the fingers – but the eyes don’t look dead.’

  ‘What eyes?’

  ‘Every house.’ He shook his head and fastened another strap. ‘In the drawer with the knives and forks, on a shelf in the cupboard, behind the jars in the larder, everywhere you go to hunt out something worth taking. I don’t like them.’ He tightened the last strap.

  ‘Eyeballs?’ Makin asked.

  Rike nodded and I shivered despite myself. No doubt they were removed as neatly as the skins. I think the precision of it unnerved me. I’ve seen a raven pluck a ripe eyeball from a head black with decay and kept right on eating my own meal. But something in the lichkin’s neat slicing felt unnatural. I shook it off.

  Marten came from the inn, banished by Katherine. A moment’s hesitation took me. Could Katherine be trusted alone with my child when she held me responsible for her nephew’s death? Might she have saved Miana from the assassin’s knife just for the chance to twist the life from my infant son? I threw the thought away. Revenge is my art, not hers.

  Martin stopped beside Rike and me, ignoring us both, staring at the heap of skins, some lost question leaving his mouth open.

  I shrugged. ‘Men are made of meat. Lichkin like to play with the pieces. I’ve seen worse in a fleshmonger’s shop. Hell, I’ve seen worse when men take against their captives.’ That last bit was a lie, but the truth was that it wasn’t conscience that stopped men short of the lichkins’ excesses – men just weren’t such accomplished butchers.

  I watched Rike rather than Marten. Nothing natural put the fear into Rike. Some things might set him running, but he’d be angry as hell while he ran and planning his revenge all the way. The last time I’d seen him run in terror had been from the ghosts on the lichway. Fingers and eyeballs stashed away in peasant houses wouldn’t do it. I’d seen him take both, and he hadn’t much cared if the former owners had finished using them.

  My gaze returned to the skin heap. Something in my imagination kept making it seem to crawl. ‘Burn that,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if it’s needed any more.’

  I went to the inn. Time to step through that door.

  ‘Damnation! Jorg where the fuck have you been?’ Miana snarled that ‘Jorg’ past small white teeth. I always said she had a pretty face and a foul mouth. And they say even the most proper of maids can swear like a sailor when labouring over a child. What words would she find when it came to push and shove? Strange to say that we’re born to our mothers’ cursing but ever after they think the young have tender ears and can hear only what might be said in church. I closed the door behind me, leaving it just an inch or two ajar.

  Inside the inn smelled of wood smoke, hot and close, and older less pleasant taints, perhaps of murders done here before the sun rose.

  ‘Sweet Jesus!’ Miana gasped and spat, clutching herself. She lay back in a great armchair heaped with cushions. Sweat beaded skin, tendons straining in her neck. ‘I don’t want my baby here. Not here.’ Katherine glanced at me across the swell of Miana’s breasts. On the walls brown smears where skinless bodies had touched rough timbers.

  I hadn’t wanted my child born on the road. It’s a hard enough place to live, and not a fit place to enter the world, not even with a gilded carriage and an honour guard decorated just as richly. And this village of the dead bore even worse omens. I thought of Degran small, frail, broken in my hands. The lichkin held Gottering in its hands – waiting – and Miana was ready to deliver.

  Gorgoth turned from the doorway of the inn, taking more wood for the pyre in the square. A thick log in each hand, lifted from those racked against the wall. Guardsmen had joined in, tearing shutters from windows, breaking up an abandoned cart. Others came from the inn’s cellar with flasks of brandy and urns of lamp oil to quicken the flames. I pulled the door open and followed Gorgoth.

  ‘Get back in here, you whore-born bastard!’

  I closed the door on Miana, watched by the Gilden Guard to either side. Eyebrows raised.

  ‘The queen is not herself,’ I said.

  Six golden-helmed heads snapped back front and centre as I passed between them.

  The lichkin held the town, held us all, though many of our number didn’t yet know it. Perhaps a little fire might loosen its grip and cleanse the air. Gottering was a spell now, an enchantment, a single great rune set out in pieces of men. Blood-magic.

  When the timbers lay doused and heaped around the pile of flayed skins I drew Gog from his scabbard. The blade gleamed in the winter sun so’s you could imagine flames dancing on its edge. I set it to the wood. ‘Burn,’ I said. And flames really did dance on that keen line.

  The blaze took fast, leaping amongst the broken wood, devouring the oil and spirits, sinking hot teeth into timber. Almost at once the meaty tang of burned flesh reached out, stronger than the smoke. Memory took me to the Haunt, walking out between scorched corpses to meet Egan of Arrow. And just a moment later, another memory, the shrieks of those the fire had left alive. Only – not memory.

  ‘What?’ I tilted my head to locate the sound. A high keening.

  Captain Harran broke into the square on horseback. ‘It’s from that copse, on the ridge to the west. Hollow Wood.’

  As we came into Gottering there had been another island in the flooded fields, three hundred yards to the west, a few acres of tangled woodland.

  The lichkins’ mercy, Gomst had said, is that in the end they let you die.

  But not yet.

  The people of Gottering still lived. They still felt it. Somewhere in that wood close on two hundred townsfolk, flayed, without fingers or eyes or teeth, howled as I burned their skins.

  ‘Jorg!’ A shout edged with scream. Katherine at the doorway, pale, framed by
auburn curls.

  I ran, sword in hand. I pushed past her.

  ‘It— It got stronger. I couldn’t stop it,’ Katherine said behind me.

  Miana lay before the fireplace and the crackling logs on bedding from the inn rooms, skirts hitched around her hips in many layers. Pain had twisted her limbs. The firelight shone on skin stretched too tight across her womb. White against that red flesh, set over my hidden child, the print of a three-fingered hand.

  ‘Miana?’ I stepped close, slamming Gog back into his scabbard. ‘Miana?’ A cold touch flickered across my chest. Perhaps that same three-fingered hand, reaching in. I have no truck with poets and their flowered words but in that moment my heart truly froze, turning to a heavy and clenched wound to see her there – a physical pain that staggered me. A weakness the lichkin infected me with, no doubt.

  ‘Miana?’ The eyes she turned my way did not know me.

  I swung around for the door, almost knocking Katherine down.

  ‘You’re leaving?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She needs you.’ Anger. Disappointment. ‘Here.’

  ‘The lichkin is reaching for both her and my son,’ I said. ‘And wherever this lichkin is it is not here.’

  I left her, left Miana, left the inn. I hastened past the pyre where skins bubbled and melted, fats running and steaming over the flagstones.

  With the brothers at my heels I ran to the corner by the bakers’ kilns, to a step that offered a view west across bright waters toward the bare trees where my enemy waited. I paused, willing my limbs to stillness, letting heartbeats count out time – time for judgment and clarity to catch me up. Moments passed with nothing but the distant howling and the black reflection of branches reaching out toward Gottering.

  ‘Surfaces and reflections, Makin,’ I said. ‘Worlds divided by such thin barriers, unseen, unknowably deep.’

  ‘Your pardon, sire?’ Makin took sanctuary in formality rather than try to follow me.

  Every fibre of me screamed for action. My wife lay marked and tormented, a stranger to me, a prison for my son. My son!

  My father would tell me, ‘find a new wife’. Nail the pair, mother and babe, to the floor with one sword thrust and ride on. Let the lichkin choke on that. And I would do it too, if no better choice remained. I would do it. I told myself I would do it.

  I held still, just a tremble in my fingers. ‘Consider the problem in hand, Lord Makin. The good bishop tells me there are at least seven lichkin, maybe more. And we know they’re striking across Attar for the first time. Maybe they’re attacking along other routes into Vyene? Spread thin? It seems that if there were many and they were confident of victory over soldiers rather than peasants, they would have come to us last night. That or they’re toying with us, cat to mouse.

  ‘Well I would rather find out about a new enemy by first encountering one on their own, so this is a chance not to miss, rather than a horror to run from,’ I said.

  It wanted us to run. All this – all this was about fear. It wanted Miana bundled into a carriage and half a thousand guardsmen to gallop off along the road to Honth.

  ‘And if it’s the cat toying with the mouse?’ Makin asked.

  I smiled. ‘What better chance will the mouse ever have to kill the cat?’

  I drew Gog and the fire that burst out along the sword made pale all flame that had ever burned there before. I set off toward the black trees and the weakening screams of Gottering, wading through dark waters with the brothers treading in my wake. And I walked rather than ran, though a fire burned in me near as fierce as that on my blade, because surfaces divide known from unknown, and though I might walk where angels fear to tread, I try not to rush in like a fool.

  25

  Floodwater always has the same stink to it, of earth after rain but gone too far, tainted with rot. The coldness of it made me clutch at my breath, rising by inches as I waded on. My face blazed with the heat of the fire on Gog’s blade, reflecting in dark and hungry water. Some foolishness made me think of the River Sane’s gentle meander through Crath City, at the bend past the Bridge of Arts where stone pillars jut from the slow current to mark an area for swimming. Mother would take us there in the high summer heat when the Sane still remembered winter. As tiny boys we would edge in, inch by inch, squealing. That shriek and gasp as the river took our privates in icy hands – I felt it again and bit down the exclamation.

  ‘Brisk!’ Sir Makin said behind me. ‘Don’t think my balls will be coming back down for a month.’

  ‘Why are we even going?’ Rike from the back.

  I glanced over my shoulder, at Gorgoth almost naked despite the cold, pushing a bow wave before him, Red Kent, his short sword and hatchet held out above the water, Makin with a grin, Rike with a sour sulk on him, Marten frowning, determined, the device on his shield the black spars of a burned house on a green field.

  ‘Why?’ Rike repeated.

  ‘Because it doesn’t want us to,’ I said, pressing on.

  I made a mental note to change my ways. If, every time an enemy demands you sit down, instead you jump up, well that predictability becomes a ring through your nose by which you can be pulled when pushing fails.

  ‘Enjoy yourselves.’ Rike sounded further behind me.

  I stopped and turned. Rike had never really taken to the business of me being king. I might have seven nations where men bent their knee to me in their thousands, through love or fear, mainly fear, but with Rike the only knee-bending took place when not to do so would get that knee broken.

  ‘Do we have to do this now, Brother Rike?’ I asked.

  He sneered. ‘What are you gonna do? Cut my skin off and scoop out my eyes?’

  Apparently the lichkin scared him more than I did.

  ‘Of course not.’ I shook my head, showing him the old smile. ‘I’m a king!’ I took a stride toward him. Lowering Gog’s point to the water so it sizzled, jumped, and spat, the steam rising between us. ‘I’ll have a professional do it. Somebody who really enjoys it. Kings don’t dirty their hands.’

  Gorgoth let out a deep laugh at that. Makin joined him. In the end even Rike gave that ‘hur’ of his and we carried on. Jokes come hard when you’re past ball-deep in icy water and heading toward hell, but fortunately my audience wasn’t too discerning. Also I wasn’t joking.

  Closer to the copse now, water around my waist, each step sinking into hidden softness. Three times I caught myself from falling, tripped by some submerged briar or fencepost. Makin went down once and came up cursing and spluttering.

  The water seemed colder closer to the trees, plates of wafer-thin ice gliding in our wake, and a mist rising, tendrils reaching to mix with the frosting of our breath. The mists rose with us as the gradient led us from the flood among the outermost of the black and dripping trees.

  I saw the first ghost only as a glimpse between trunks, a figure moving fast but not stirring the calf-deep water. Just a glimpse, ragged black hair, muddy, a child. The name Orscar floated through me, though I couldn’t place it. I turned to warn the brothers, sword still levelled at where the boy had been. And of course found only mist to meet me. Mist and an iron cross, a pendant hanging from a low branch, a blob of red enamel at the crossing point. For the blood of Christ.

  ‘I know this game of shades, dead-thing!’ I swung Gog in a slow circle, mists shrivelling back before the flames. ‘Bring my dead mother, William, the baby if you must. Bring the dead of Gelleth, bring Greyson’s ghost with his eyes gone, bring Lesha carrying her head. You’re playing the wrong hand against me. I’ve known worse.’

  ‘Have you now?’

  A sharp pain took me in the chest. I turned again and the fire on Gog died, blade dropping as the strength left my arm.

  Father stood, wolf-robed, iron crowned, iron in his hair, winter in his eyes.

  ‘You’re not dead.’ The words left me, soft and without emotion. ‘Not a ghost.’

  ‘Am I not?’

  ‘You’re not!’ Beneath my breast
plate blood spilled, pumped from an old wound, soaking my shirt and the woollens over it, running in hot rivulets down across my belly. ‘The Tall Castle wouldn’t fall to marsh corpses.’ I shook my head. ‘And your men are too scared to slit your throat.’ I blinked. He stood there, the water rippling around his high boots, solid and meaner than nails, not some grey spectre.

  ‘You’ll be a father within the hour, Jorg.’ He looked at his hands, spread them before his belt, turning them palm to back, back to palm.

  ‘Don’t—’ Loose fingers found a tighter grip on Gog’s hilt. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Ghosts know what they know.’ He turned to stare into the fog.

  ‘You’re not dead.’ It wasn’t possible. He couldn’t die. Not that old man. And not without me being the one to do it. ‘How –’

  ‘The wrong son died, Jorg.’ I never knew anyone to match Father’s talent for cutting across a man’s words without raising his voice. ‘It should have been William taken from the thorns. He had my strength. You were ever your mother’s whelp. Better Degran even than you. Better even him.’

  ‘Who killed you?’ I made it a demand.

  ‘Who?’ Those eyes found me again. I had thought it cold before. ‘My heart gave out, pounding that pretty Teuton of mine. What was it you called her? The Scorron whore.’

  The waters rose about us, swirling, eddying around the trees. Knee-deep, thigh-deep.

  My strength left me with each heartbeat, limbs icy, the only warmth that of the blood spilling from the old wound, the one Father gave me, the one that should never have healed. ‘You’ll be a father soon, Jorg. That little southern wife of yours will push out a son. In slime and blood, shouting at the world. Just like mine did. The Pope’s man failed. I told her, “send three, two at the least”, but the silly bitch sent just the one. Said he was her best. I had high hopes, but he failed.’

  ‘You knew?’ The flood reached my chest. Without its support I doubted I could stand. When it touched the wound I felt the coldness pour into me, as if black water were filling me like a hollow gourd.