Emperor of Thorns Read online

  ‘It’s good that you won’t see your boy,’ my father told me. ‘You’re too weak to raise a son.’ His wolfskin lifted on the flood but it meant nothing to him. He watched me with just the hint of a smile, a thing as cold as his regard.

  The water spilled around my neck, putting a chatter in my teeth, my hair floating around me, drawn by the current. The weight of my armour, of the sword held in a numb hand, the pull of the mud, all held me down.

  I thought of my child, of Miana with the white hand seared on her belly, and a spark of anger lit in me despite the cold. ‘You were mine to kill, old man.’ I snarled it before the water closed my mouth and swallowed me.

  I looked up at a distant surface through dark weeds – the tangled drift of my hair. Far above me, impossibly far, a rippled surface fracturing the daylight to send weak glimmers down into the icy depths. A hand hung over me, limp, reaching for the sky. My hand. The dim and greenish light moved ripple patterns across my fingers.

  I stared. Stared at that distant sun. It could be a million miles away. Lundist had said a million. More than a million. The waters held me. I hung limp and stared until that twinkling patch of green-tinted light became all I could see, became my world.

  Shapes resolved. Green-tinted. And it seemed, though the water held me, though my chest ached for air and my heart pounded behind my ribs, that I looked not at the sky through water, but through the faint green stain of Attar glass into an inn room. A room where a fire burned in the hearth, where Miana lay, and Katherine crouched at her side.

  I saw the lichkin come for them, the door flying apart in splinters. It walked in, slow and measured, a bone-thing, shrouded in dead space where the eye can’t see. The creature had left us a trap in the Hollow Wood and waited for us to leave. While we lay drowning the lichkin slipped into Gottering.

  Guardsmen came hard on its heels. On her heels. Somehow I knew the lichkin for a she. They fell choking, perhaps drowning with their own ghosts, strangled by lost loves, choked by disapproving parents, or whatever tawdry fragments of their past haunted them. We all carry the seeds of our own destruction with us, we all drag our history behind us like rusted chain.

  Katherine rose to meet her.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come.’ Somehow Katherine’s voice reached me, cut through to my dying brain, past the thunder of my heart.

  The lichkin advanced on Katherine, only its hands clear to me, white, bone-like, root-like. My vision pulsed and prickled. In a moment I would take the breath my body screamed for.

  ‘You don’t know much, dead-thing.’ Katherine stood before it, the muted reds of her travel-gown swaying around her. Even dying I saw her beauty. Without desire – just as a statement, like the glory of a stained-glass window, or the play of light and shadow across mountains. I saw her fear too, and the strength that held it down.

  Those hands reached for her, fast but slowing, as if finding some invisible resistance.

  ‘You can’t be very old, dead-thing,’ she said. ‘It’s written in the oldest books. Sleep and death are brother and sister. The Bard knew it. For in death’s sleep what dreams will come? And believe me dead-thing, I know dreams.’

  The lichkin howled and raised a grey swirl around Katherine. Her skirts whipped about her. At Katherine’s feet Miana twisted and moaned. Shapes moved in that swirl. Shapes and suggestions.

  ‘Enough,’ Katherine said, sharp voiced. ‘Ghosts, is it? But dreams are populated by ghosts and little else. Ghosts are made of dreams, dead dreams, lost dreams, bad dreams, dreams that get stuck in tight little circles, that carve their own rut in the fabric of the world and won’t let go.’

  Katherine’s hand snaked out and caught something from the swirl, held it by the throat. To me it was Orscar from the monastery, Sunny lashed to the Bad Dogs’ pole, Lesha wanting me to save her, the boy in Albaseat beaten by the smith. You can’t save them all so why save any? She choked it, fingers turning white with strain. At the last Father’s face hung there, black with blood. And then, poof, it was gone, a wisp of smoke, nothing more.

  Katherine stepped forward, a quick step. And the lichkin flinched. It turned to run. But she caught it. Caught its bone-white hand in hers. Katherine held the lichkin, rigid with effort, hand growing white, veins growing dark and darker still, but she refused to release it.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come.’

  And I broke the surface. Retching and gasping, I sat up, the water about me a foot deep, eighteen inches maybe. No more. I drew in the sweetest breath and parted the black veil of my hair. All about me, at the edge of the Hollow Wood, the brothers sat, choking and gasping, spitting water, purple in the face.

  26

  Chella’s Story

  The carriage jolted across frost-stiffened mud and Chella cursed again. On the bench opposite, Kai looked far more comfortable, on the edge of sleep almost, as if bounced in his nurse’s arms. She clutched the armrest, fingers white on the leather. Five years starved of necromancy, five years since the Ancrath boy had drained her, shrivelled up her power in the firestorm of his ghosts. She had thought the Dead King merely cruel to punish her so, to leave her stranded once more on the shores of life, plagued by the everyday aches and pains of flesh, mocked by trivialities like temperature. Now she appreciated his cunning too.

  ‘Damnation.’ Chella hugged her furs close about her. ‘Who made the autumn so chill?’

  ‘Who decided to hold Congression on the edge of winter?’ Kai asked. ‘That’s the more reasonable question.’

  Chella felt cold, not reasonable. Kai’s easy manner irked her. She returned often now to the day the mire-ghouls had dragged him and the girl to her through the reeds. Mud and slime in their hair, horror frozen into their fresh young faces. Each display of his returning confidence, each hint of the mild contempt that hid behind his smile, made her regret deciding to use him the more. Better he had died with his pert little strumpet.

  Necromancy at its heart is a guilty pleasure, a surrender to the darkest instinct. The fact that Golden Boy had picked up his old self-assurance again, his charm and his winning smile, as if he just dabbled in a secret vice, a necessary evil, dug at her moment to moment. That he proved so good at it made her want to claw the face off him. He seemed to think it something he could set aside when no longer required, like he had that girl. What was her name? Sula? She wondered if Kai could still remember it.

  Necromancy has to cost you. It had certainly cost Chella. Jorg might have taken a bite for free, but all he got was a taste. Golden Boy on the other hand had picked it up as though it were nothing but juggling, and had yet to drop a ball.

  ‘I hate being alive,’ Chella spoke to the passing world through the carriage grille, hedgerows edged with hoarfrost so thick that every twig bristled with thorns of ice.

  ‘And yet we hang to it so dear,’ Kai said. ‘Sometimes by fingertips.’

  He had walked the dry lands now. Thought he knew it all. Thought he knew both sides of the coin from his stumbling in the borders where newly dead sometimes lost their way. Chella wondered how the deep voyaging would change him. What it would be that took the ease from his smile. Somewhere past Absolution, in the places where angels fear to tread, maybe even across the black sands to the caves where lichkin dwell. It waited for him out there – and on the day of his dark epiphany she would forgive him his slights and his superiority for they would be broken things that no longer held use for him. Until that day, though … one more cheerful encouragement and she would take his face.

  The roll and rock of the carriage made her stomach jump. Her bones ached so it hurt to sit. And the cold, the damp, insidious cold! She wiped her nose, leaving a glistening trail across the back of her hand, then sniffed, noting and pretending to ignore Kai’s look of faint disgust.

  We play with corpses and my mucus offends him!

  Being so alive made her petty and weak.

  The carriage rolled to a halt, the coachman banging three times on the roof.

  Kai looked up.
‘Trouble?’

  Chella sensed nothing but in her diminished state that meant little. She shrugged, leaned forward, and opened the carriage door.

  Axtis stood in the mud, his golden armour bright in the winter sun, hurting her eyes. More of the Gilden Guard pressed around him on horseback. ‘Smoke rising over the town ahead.’

  ‘Which town?’ Chella squinted. Leaving the carriage didn’t appeal, the sun promised warmth, but it lied.

  ‘Gottering.’

  ‘Never heard of it. Send riders ahead and drive on.’ She leaned back into the carriage and closed the door. ‘Two hundred and fifty men! Worried over smoke. If the place was one big bonfire we could ride through.’

  ‘Perhaps our friends have been here before us.’ Kai caught the mist of his breath and shaped it into a question mark, fading between them. Old tricks.

  ‘Lichkin are no one’s friends, Wind-sworn. You’d do well to remember that.’

  The carriage juddered into motion again and before long rolled on into smooth mud and tinkling ice crusts.

  ‘The road is flooded – we’re fording.’ Kai, head back against the rests, eyes closed. ‘There’s a pyre of sorts in the town square. No bones.’

  Kai had told her his wind-sight grew hand in hand with his dead-sight. She hated him the more for it. His eyeballs twitched beneath his eyelids, looking ahead of them, seeing what she could not. Still, she allowed herself a smile. There were things ahead that Kai would not see coming, however far his vision rode the wind. The Dead King’s cunning had set them on this path. Two necromancers sent to Congression. The necromancy necessary to his purpose, and just as necessary the fact that they stood close enough to life to pass as untainted, Kai too new to his calling to raise alarm, and she too distant from her old power to seem a threat.

  Dark waters seeped around the door join as they went, the carriage half-floating now. Then, as it seemed they would sink, the wheels found the road once more and they jolted back onto dry land. Chella caught the stink of roast meat.

  ‘It’s a funeral pyre.’

  ‘There are no bones,’ Kai said. ‘And the festival flags are out. A celebration maybe?’

  Chella knew death. She shook her head.

  Stepping from the carriage she jumped to the ground before it came to a halt.

  ‘What is it?’ Kai dropped down behind her.

  Chella raised a hand to silence him, not that she listened with her ears, but it felt good to shut him up.

  ‘Screaming …’ she said. Horrible agony. Her skin burned with it. A hand rose before her face and for a moment she didn’t recognize it as hers, hanging on invisible thread, one long finger, bony in the knuckle, pointing. The questing hand settled, indicating the open waters between the town and a nearby copse. ‘There.’

  ‘I can barely sense it,’ Kai said.

  ‘It’s hiding.’ Chella brought her hands together before her, shaping her will. She might have only an echo of her power but she wielded what she held with lifetimes of experience. ‘Help me bring it out.’

  Drawing forth dead things from behind the veil always put Chella in mind of the cesspit back in Jonholt. A hot summer and the stink rose between the boards, acrid, strong enough to make her eyes water that day, the day she dropped Nan Robtin’s brooch. Dropped was the wrong word. She had pinned it carefully to her smock, piercing coarse wool with the steel pin. And even so it fell, turning in the air, sparkling, making diamond fractures of the light, though it was only glass and mirror. She missed the brooch twice in the air, fingers brushing it, then fumbled it, sending it skittering across the boards and down the dung hole.

  For the longest time Chella had stood and stared at the hole. The image of the sparkling brooch falling into darkness played across her vision. She hadn’t asked to take it. Nan would have said no. It’s borrowing if you bring it back, she had told herself.

  ‘Stealing if you don’t,’ she whispered, there by the cesspit behind the scrub lilacs.

  She had lain flat upon the boards, nose wrinkled, breath held against the physical force of the stench. Cheek to the wood, arm reaching down, the stained boards scraping her bicep through her smock. Fingers found the filth, the coldness surprising, a crawling sensation of revulsion as she dipped in, stomach heaving, her hand enveloped now, wanting to make a fist and yet stretching out, questing.

  The need to draw breath built in her chest, a hammering demand. Eyes screwed tight. Toes curled, legs drumming, hand questing. YOU WILL BREATHE. And in the end the body’s wants prove stronger than the mind’s and you always take the breath.

  Chella had lain gagging, a thin spill of acid spew drooling from her panting mouth, and still her fingers hunted in a cold world, half-solid, half-liquid.

  And after all that – the sudden bite of the brooch pin made her scream and whip her hand out, empty, splattering filth.

  ‘The trick,’ she muttered to Kai, ‘is to let it bite.’

  When the bite came Kai fell shrieking, and Chella endured with grim satisfaction, hauling to bring out what was lost and hidden. Weak as she was, Chella used the life that filled her to tempt and anchor her prey. At the last, when her bones threatened to tear through flesh and skin if she did not release her hold, Chella pulled harder still and a mist began to coil about the surface of the flood. Frost patterns spread beneath the mist, racing in wild, angular profusion over dark water.

  It rose in a splintering of ice, something both more white than the frost, blacker than the waters, a creature of bone-pale limbs cast with midnight shadow, blade-thin, hands dividing root-like into three fingers. And somehow, despite the lack of defining features, undeniably female. Mouthless, her pain scaled a different register, resonating in an ache deep in the sockets of Chella’s teeth. Men of the guard staggered around her, choking, tearing at their eyes.

  ‘Keres!’ Chella named the lichkin, sealing it back into the world.

  ‘What happened?’ Kai climbed to his feet, hauling in a breath. ‘I can see it. What’s changed?’

  ‘I—’ Something had changed, the lichkin lay revealed, stripped of its shroud of ghosts.

  Kai clenched his jaw against the lichkin’s resonating agony.

  The ghosts were gone – flayed away.

  And in that moment Chella understood.

  ‘She’s been skinned.’

  27

  Five years earlier

  I lay a long time in the dark, gripped by fever. I lay in the dust beside the fresh corpse of a thousand-year-old man and from time to time, when my mind grew clear enough to understand the slurred demands of my leathery tongue, I drank.

  Without light and without sound, dreams cannot be told from delirium. I talked to myself – mutters and accusations – and sometimes to Fexler, face-down, the back of his head a wet mess of soft and sharp. I held his gun – my totem against terrors in the night. In the other hand I clutched the thorn-patterned box, refusing the urge to open it even in the madness of fever.

  I spoke to my demons, addressing each with long and dreary monologues as I twisted in the dust. Lesha’s head watched me from the alcove where the pills had been, her skin luminous, blood oozing black from the stump of her neck. Sunny came eyeless to stand vigil, the words from his seared tongue as incoherent as mine. William came hand in hand with mother, her eyes worried, his hard as stones.

  ‘I tried to save you.’ Same old story – no new excuses from Jorgy.

  He shook his head, blood and curls. We both knew thorns would not have held him.

  The dead of Gelleth came to stand watch, and my brothers from the mire, collected by Chella just for me.

  And in time Fexler’s medicines worked their slow magic, my fever broke, and dreams faded into darkness, William’s eyes the last to go, hanging like an accusation.

  ‘I’m hungry.’ The bones of my spine grated as I sat up.

  I didn’t know how long I’d lain there – long enough for Fexler to smell the wrong kind of sweet. But even that didn’t stop the growling of my stomach.


  I made a meal of the hardtack in my pack, finding it with blind fingers and chewing in the dark, spitting out the occasional inedibles fished out by mistake. I looted Fexler without squandering my light, a fingertip search discovering and exploring his many pockets. In one hand I held my blunted knife ready, not trusting his cold and stiff corpse to suffer my attentions without protest. He lay quiet, though. Perhaps the Builders had the means to defend their halls from such influences just as the seals the mind-sworn place on royal tombs hold their charges safe. I found a lightweight rectangular box, like a card case, with heavy, rattling contents, elsewhere several flexible cards that felt like plasteek, tubes that might have been writing instruments in his breast pocket. All of them went into my pack.

  At last, when I felt ready to move, I relit my flask-and-wick lamp.

  Getting into the shaft proved every bit the nightmare I had imagined it. Climbing up to a point at which I could snag the rope proved worse. Missing the rope, falling, and having to repeat the process nearly ended my tale with a dusty skeleton at the bottom of a deep, dry hole.

  When I heaved myself out into the noonday sun, bloody-handed, panting, too dry to sweat, Balky and the stallion were waiting where I left them, offering the same looks they had seen me off with. The stallion had flecks of white foam on his muzzle and both carried the signs of dehydration, sunken flesh and an unhealthy glitter to the eyes. I stood before them, bent over with exhaustion, heaving in my breath, eyes screwed tight against the brightness of the day. I wondered if the Builder-ghosts felt this way when they came out into one world from another. Did they have to struggle from the deep places of their strange existence to emerge like Fexler did, painted by machines for human eyes? Those old ghosts watched me as I straightened, as one hand lifted to shield my gaze. I sensed their attention. As blank and unreadable as the mule’s and surely more alien.