King of Thorns be-2 Page 25

  “The sea,” I shouted. I pointed for good measure. The Prince of Arrow had advised me to see the ocean and it looked as though it might be the last thing I did. The Brothers needed no encouragement. We set off running, hoping that Brother Sim would prove as slow as the other dead men and not as fast as we remembered him.

  Brother Row you can trust. Trust him to lie, trust him to cheat, perhaps to betray. Most of all trust him to be true to what he is, a weasel, a killer in the dark, handy in the fight. Trust in all that and he will not disappoint.

  33

  Four years earlier

  The sea air added no more than a salt tang to the rankness of the Cantanlona bogs. I could see a grey expanse of water now, still miles off.

  “At least they’re slow,” Kent said. He splashed along beside me, axe in hand. He risked a backward glance. Running in a marsh with a sharp axe whilst looking over your shoulder is not to be advised. But then again, nothing we had done for two days was advisable.

  The sea breeze carried a low moaning with it. I tried not to worry about that.

  We pressed on, unwilling to rest after the last time. Four horses followed us, Row’s having taken a broken ankle after putting its leg down a mud-hole. I made Kent cut its legs off once Row had slit its throat. “I’m not having Chella stand him up again and have her dead men ride after us.”

  The sea kept looking bigger by the minute. We’d soon be in the salt marsh.

  “Jesus please us.” Row stopped dead ahead of me. Of all the Brothers he was the one least likely to call on divine aid.

  I came to his shoulder. The tufted marshland we’d been crossing ended without warning and a long stretch of mudflats reached out before us, eventually giving over to reed-beds after two hundred yards or so. The heads were what stopped Row, not the mud.

  Every five yards, like cabbages in a field, a head stuck up from the flats. The closest ones stopped moaning and swivelled their eyes to watch us.

  The one by Row’s feet, a woman of middle years, slightly jowly, strained to see our faces. “God save me,” she said. “Save me.”

  “You’re alive?” I knelt beside her on one knee, the mud firm beneath me, like wet clay.

  “Save me!” A shriek now.

  “They’re underneath.” A man to our left, Makin’s age maybe, black-bearded, the mud only in the lower parts of his beard as if rain had washed him clean.

  I reached out with the necromancy lurking in my fingertips. I could sense no more death in this mud than in any other part of the bog. Except around the people themselves. I could feel the life leaching out of them-being replaced by something less vital, but more durable.

  “They’re tearing my skin off!” The man’s voice rose to a howl.

  To our right, a younger woman, black hair flowing down into the mud. She raised her face to us, the skin mottled with dark veins like those on my chest. She snarled. A deep throaty sound, full of hunger. And behind her another woman who might have been her sister. “They come at night. Dead children. They give us sour water and feed us awful things. Awful things.” She hung her head again.

  “Kill me.” A man farther out on the mudflats.

  “And me.” Another.

  “How long…” I said.

  “How long have you been here?” Makin asked.

  “Three days.”

  “Two weeks.”

  “Nine days.”

  “Forever!” The moaning and the snarling grew in volume.

  I stood, cold in my limbs and sick in my stomach. “Why?” I asked Makin. He shrugged.

  “I know,” Rike said.

  “You don’t know anything, Rike,” I told him.

  But he did. “The quick and the dead,” he said. “She’s making them here. Letting them stew. She’s turning them slowly and they’ll be fast. Heard of this kind before.”

  Out on the flats another head watched us with new hunger and screeched. Several more took up the call.

  “Give them what they want, Kent,” I said.

  “No! Please mercy.” The woman at Row’s feet begged. “I have children.”

  “Or if they don’t want it, give them what they need,” I said.

  Kent set to cropping the field. Red work and hard on the back. The others pitched in, Rike with rare enthusiasm.

  We moved on at a trot, eager to be quit of the place.

  “That won’t be the only field,” Makin said. He’d lost his other boot along the way and ran barefoot now.

  I wasn’t so much worried about what else Chella had growing. Rather I worried about what she had already grown.

  We moved through a green sea to reach a grey one. The reeds came chest high and higher, dark mud around them that took you calf-deep before your next step. Broad swathes of open mud divided the reed banks, each with a tiny stream trickling at its middle. I started to hear the distant waves as we broke out onto yet another of these divisions.

  “No.” Grumlow put a hand on my shoulder before I stepped onto the mud.

  Out toward the middle, where the stream made a bright ribbon, the mud heaved.

  Row took out his bow. I wound the Nuban’s crossbow.

  The mud flexed again, mounded, and began to flow in reluctant waves as something black emerged.

  “It’s a fucking boat,” Rike said.

  Clearly it was Rike’s day for being right. A fishing boat of black and rotting timber emerged as if surging from beneath a rogue wave, its crew lifting themselves from the deck, shedding mud and clumps of decayed flesh as they rose. I thought of the fat captain on his barge crossing the Rhyme. Perhaps he’d made the wise choice to stick to the route he knew after all.

  “Back!” And I led them into the reed-beds again.

  We ran, carving our path through reeds that overtopped me, reed-heads beating at my face.

  “Something’s coming,” Rike shouted. He could still see above the green.

  “From the boat?” I called.

  “No. The other side.”

  We veered away and ran harder.

  I could hear them. Gaining on us, beating a path through the stems.

  “What is it?” I shouted.

  “Can’t see,” Rike said, panting now. “I just see the reeds falling.”

  “Stop!” And I followed my own order. I threw the Nuban’s bow down and whipped out my sword, scything through reeds. “Cut a clearing!” I shouted.

  There’s no point running if you’re going to be caught.

  Three dead men tore into our clearing as we cut it. They moved at a blinding pace, howling the moment they saw us. Without hesitation all three launched themselves at us, hands reaching for throats. Row went down. I skewered the one that chose me. He literally swallowed my sword, his split cheeks reaching the hilt whilst the point dug between his lungs and down into his stomach. An image of Thomas at the circus flashed to mind.

  Having his vital organs divided by four foot of steel only seemed to enrage my foe. He almost tore the sword from my grip as he struggled to take hold of my throat. I held on and he pushed me back through the reeds, him nearly on all fours, lunging at me as if to take more of the sword. If he could have opened his jaws wider he would have taken the hilt and my hands too. Vital organs seemed to be a misnomer.

  The dead man pushed on, gargling dark blood as he forced me back, splashing into a sucking pool. I dug in, twisted my blade, and ripped it down, carving a path out through his neck, chest, and stomach. His guts flooded out and he pitched into the pool, clawing at me as I tore free and drove my sword into the firmer ground. Kicking in wild fear and hauling on my sword I managed to drag myself out of the pool. I lay on my back, panting and gasping. I could hear the howls and snarls of the other dead men and the Brothers cursing as they fought. The reeds rose about my head like forest giants, swaying gently against the blueness of the sky.

  By the time I found my breath and returned to the cut clearing, the fight had ended.

  “Row’s dead.” Makin scrubbed at rips on his cheek with a
handful of reeds. They seemed to make matters worse, but maybe he wanted to bleed it clean.

  “I never liked him,” I said. We said that sort of thing on the road. Also it was true.

  “Make sure there’s nothing left for Chella to play with,” I told Kent.

  He set to beheading the first of our attackers. Someone had already taken its arms off and mud filled its mouth, but it still wriggled and glared.

  Seeing Makin tend his wounds I thought to pat myself down. Sometimes it’s hours before you notice an injury taken in battle.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “What?” Makin looked up.

  “I’ve lost the box.” I ran my hands over my hips as if I could have missed it the first time.

  “Good riddance,” Makin said.

  I walked back along the path of flattened reeds where the dead man had pushed me. Nothing. I reached the sucking pool.

  “It’s sunk here,” I said.

  “Good.” Makin came up behind me.

  I turned away. It didn’t feel right to lose it. It felt like something I should keep. Part of me.

  “Kent!” I shouted. He stopped with his axe poised overhead, Row’s corpse at his feet.

  “Leave him,” I said.

  I walked back and knelt beside Row. Death isn’t pretty close up. The old man had fouled himself and stunk even worse than usual. Red-and-pink tatters of his throat hung down over his collarbones; loose ends of white cartilage reached out to frame the dark hole to his lungs. Trails of snot and purple blood had run from his nose, and his eyes had rolled to the left at a painfully sharp angle.

  “I’ve not finished with you, Brother Row,” I said.

  I took his hands in mine. Dead men’s hands are not intrinsically unpleasant but in truth it did make my skin crawl as I laced fingers with him. He lay limp, the hard skin at the top of his palms scratched against me.

  “What’re you doing?” Grumlow asked.

  “I have a job for you, Brother Row,” I said.

  I searched for him. He couldn’t have gone far in just a few minutes. I felt the pulse of necromancy in the unhealed wound in my chest. A dark hand closed around my heart and a chill wrapped me.

  I knew I had very little power, just a trickle, like the ribbon of water in those wide avenues of mud. But Row still held warmth. His heart didn’t beat but it twitched and quivered, and more important-I knew him blood to bone. I’d never liked him, but I knew him.

  To make a dead man walk you have to wear his skin. You have to ease under it, to let your heartbeat echo in him, to run your mind along his thoughts.

  I spat like Row did. I lifted my head and watched the Brothers with narrowed eyes, seeing them with Row’s likes, dislikes, jealousy, old grudges, remembered debts.

  “Brother Row,” I said.

  I got up. We got up. He got up.

  I stood face to face with his corpse and he watched me from a distant place through eyes he once owned. The Brothers said nothing as I walked back to the pool and Row followed me.

  “Find it,” I said.

  I didn’t have to explain myself. We wore the same skin.

  Row walked into the pool and let it take him. I crouched to watch.

  Row had sunk from view before I felt the steel at my neck. I looked around, up along the blade.

  “Don’t ever do that to me,” Makin said. “Swear it.”

  “I so swear,” I said.

  I needed no convincing.

  34

  Four years earlier

  It seemed that we had been running in the marshes for most of our lives. Mud spattered each of us to the tops of our heads. The Brothers showed white skin only where they had scraped the filth from around their eyes. Now as the sun lowered red toward the western horizon it gave them a wild look. Soon, when the sun drowned in the marsh and left us in darkness, we would drown too.

  “More of the bastards,” Rike shouted. Once again he was the only one who could see over the reed-sea.

  “How many?” I asked.

  “All of them,” he said. “It’s like all the reeds are falling.”

  I could hear the snarls, faint but clear on the evening air. I patted the box at my hip. It took Row two hours to find, two hours before his hand finally broke the surface to give it to me. The Brothers had not liked waiting, but two more hours would not have got us out of Chella’s muddy hell. We left him in the pool. I told Makin I had set him free. But I didn’t.

  “Can you see any clear ground?” I asked.

  Rike didn’t answer but he set off with purpose so we followed.

  The snarling grew louder, closer behind us. We ran hard, the splashing of quick dead feet closer by the second, and the shredding of reeds as they tore their path.

  One moment I ran through a rushing green blindness and the next I broke clear onto a low mound. It felt like a hill though it rose no higher than three feet above the water level.

  “Good work,” I told Rike, then gasped in breath. It’s better to die in the open.

  Chella’s army converged on us from all sides. The quick ones, mottled and mire-stained, undying rage on their faces and an unholy light in their eyes, dozens of them, flowing out to surround the mound. Behind them, minutes later, shambling in through the flattened reeds, came the grey and rotting dead, and amongst them the bog-dead from the depths, cured to the toughness of old leather and of a similar colour. I saw Price’s tall bones and tattered flesh overtopping all others. Chella walked at his side wearing a white dress, all lace and trains such as might be worn at a royal wedding. Hardly a touch of mud on it.

  “Hello, Jorg,” she said. She stood too far away for me to hear but every dead mouth whispered her words.

  “Go to hell, bitch.” I would rather have said something clever.

  “No harsh words on our wedding day, Jorg,” she said, and the dead echoed her. “The Dead King is risen. The black ships sail. You’ll join with me. Love me. And together we will open the Gilden Gate for our master and set a new emperor on the throne.”

  The dead of Gelleth came then, wandering through the marsh as if lost, ambling one way and the next. Ghosts these, but looking real enough, with their burns and their sores, teeth missing, hair and skin falling away. Hundreds of them, thousands, in a great ring of accusation. They pressed so hard that at the back some of the bog-dead were pushed aside and trampled under.

  “So,” said Rike. “Marry the bitch.”

  “She’s going to kill you all either way, Rike. She’ll have your corpse walking beside her. Price on one side, you on the other, the brothers back together again.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Fuck that then.”

  “Come now, Jorg, don’t be a baby,” Chella said, and the dead spoke with her. She spoke again, echoed this time by just one voice, from a corpse woman close by the edge of our mound. A muddy corpse, one arm chewed to the bone, her skin stained, lips grey and rotting, but something of Ruth’s lines in her face. “The Dead King is coming. The dead rise like a tide. They outnumber the living, and each battle makes more corpses, not more men.” The dead woman’s tongue writhed, black and glistening, Chella’s words slipping from it. “Join with me, Jorg. There’s a place for you in this. There’s power to be taken and held.”

  “There’s more to this,” I said. Even the high esteem in which I held my own charms didn’t allow me to believe her so smitten as to cross nations for this. And if vengeance drove her then she could take it easily enough now without this charade. “The Dead King scares you.” She sounded too eager, desperate even. “What does he want with me?”

  Even with so many yards between us I could read her. She didn’t know.

  I made to step forward but something caught my foot. Looking down I saw teeth, a dog’s skull half-buried, half-emerged, gripping my foot. Another ghost, but it pinned me even so.

  I looked out across the dead horde, scanning the packed crowds of ghosts behind them. Chella couldn’t know about my dog, Justice. She couldn’t have gathered all the de
ad of Gelleth or learned their stories. Somehow this came from me. Somehow Chella was pulling the ghosts of my past out through whatever hole it was I made in the world. And not even the ghosts I knew of but the ghosts of those whose end I caused. I felt the corner of an idea, not the whole shape of it, but a corner.

  The skull brought my gaze back to the ground at my feet. “You shouldn’t have done that,” I said. I tore free. I felt him rip me but Justice’s teeth left no marks upon my boot. It was just pain, no blood. It was just my mind that trapped me. The ghosts couldn’t harm us or we would have died in Ruth’s house, we would have burned with them when the Builders’ Sun lit. Chella brought them only to torment me.

  “Let’s get married, dear-heart,” Chella said. “The congregation is assembled. I’m sure we can find a cleric to perform the ceremony.”

  And pushing from the other ghosts came Friar Glen, a shade wavering in the daylight, less clear than the other spirits, as if something tried to keep him back. At my hip the box of memories grew heavy. I hadn’t known Friar Glen to be dead, but perhaps I knew it once and chose to forget. He came with a slow step, hobbling, though I could see no wound upon him, and he didn’t look well pleased. In one hand he held a knife, a familiar knife, red with blood. When a dead man shambled into his path the friar stabbed him in the neck. The creature toppled with the knife still in him. Ghosts couldn’t hurt the living, but apparently they could hurt the dead plenty. Friar Glen hobbled on until he stood at Chella’s side.

  I wondered how the friar’s ghost came to be here, watching me with such hatred. I could feel it from fifty yards. But more than that-more than I wondered about Friar Glen-I circled around the words Chella spoke before she called him.

  The congregation is assembled.

  The quick-dead moved closer though I heard no instruction. They took slow steps, their hands ready to grab and twist and tear. Against so many we would last moments.

  “It’s no kind of wedding if my family can’t attend.” I sheathed my sword.