Emperor of Thorns Read online

  ‘Don’t! He’ll wake up!’ Katherine’s voice, in my ear or in his, I couldn’t tell.

  The sword whispered from its sheath, a decent blade from the forge of Samath down by the Bridge of Change, runed for sharpness. Ahead of us the ghouls would be entering Mother’s tomb.

  ‘I won’t let him.’ Quite how I would stop Hool waking wasn’t something that concerned me. Perhaps just wanting it enough would make it happen in this world the Builders had left us. Though whatever Fexler said it seemed that wanting seldom made it so.

  Katherine had set Hool striding – I made him sprint, whipping his sword in a figure eight to get a sense of its weight and balance. I don’t know quite how I worked his strings. It’s possible Katherine took pity on me and lent her strength, but I’ve found that when my blood kin are threatened, even when they’re dead already, my will takes on an edge.

  When you’ve committed yourself to violence it takes an almost inhuman effort to stop short. It’s one of those things that once you’ve started need to be finished, rather like coitus, interrupting that’s a sin, even the priests say so. I stopped though, and Robart Hool didn’t wake. Charging in would likely provide a fresh corpse for the ghouls, and whatever friends might be accompanying them, to play with. But to raise the alarm might take us too far away, take too long, and let the invaders escape with whatever prize they came for.

  Instead I ran Hool back up the corridor, up the steps, to the Short Bridge. He reached it breathing more heavily but not winded. In wall recesses to either side of the bridge lay silver panels with smooth silver buttons. Some combination of the buttons would raise the door, an implacable slab of Builder steel from which a thousand swords might be forged – one of the Ancrath treasures.

  I’d never seen the door raised. No one had ever told me which buttons to push.

  ‘Father never dreamed the combination for you I suppose?’ I asked.

  Katherine didn’t reply but Hool shuddered for her. I wondered if Father’s dreams were too dark for her to tread.

  ‘Fuck it.’

  I drove Hool’s blade through the panel. The door slammed up with such speed that one of the balanced planks hadn’t time to fall away. It became splinters. Along the corridor behind me glow-bulbs flickered on in several places, creating islands of reddish light. In some distant place a siren started up, sounding for all the world like the voice of the Connath watchtower, though I doubted three strong men had taken to the winding handle of some similar device. This voice came more crisp, more clear, the work of a more ancient machine. Where the running and the stabbing and the crashing of steel doors had failed, this distant wailing started to undo my grip on Hool, peeling my fingers back one at a time, lifting him from sleep as if he were a diver in some dark sea now struggling for the shimmer of the surface. I pressed him down again, the action pushing me toward that surface, at once both close and far away. The sounds of the carriage started to leak into my ears, the creak of the frame, rumble of wheels, Gomst’s snores.

  ‘No.’

  Hool and I ran back, bare feet slapping, following the turns as if remembering a waking dream that is slipping through your grasp even as you seize it.

  Close now. One more corner.

  Darts came hissing out of the darkness. One struck the oil lamp and glanced away. The other sunk into Hool’s chest, the thick pectoral muscle on the left. A small red circle grew around the black shaft of it.

  Keep running. Keep dreaming.

  Hool proved to be too fast on his feet and the line of sight too short for a second volley. He threw the lamp and raced after it rather than run while splashing oil with each step. The lamp shattered against the wall where the corridor turned, the bloom of fire silhouetting two ghouls, lurking at the corner, quick fingers pushing new darts into their blowpipes. He reached them as they drew breath for their shots. The swing of his sword destroyed both pipes. They moved swift and sure, these creatures, different from the dead men Chella set walking, corrupt but alive, once men perhaps but shaped by the poisons of the promised lands.

  Both leapt for us, and Hool’s next slash opened one in the air, shoulder to hip, pale grey guts slopping out in a welter of black blood. The other bore him to the ground, talons in his shoulders, grey teeth filed to points snapping before his face. With the sword trapped between us and the ghoul Hool could do little but roll and push. The creature hadn’t much weight to it, maybe half of what a grown man might weigh, but its wiry limbs held a fearsome strength. Its breath stank of graves, and those teeth straining so hard to close on flesh put a horror in me even though it wasn’t my face it wanted to eat off the bone.

  Desperation lent Hool the brute force needed to win free. He lifted himself off the ghoul using the sword between them as a bar. Its talons raked his shoulders, the blood spattering down across its chest. Panting and cursing Hool pinned the ghoul with his knees and turned the blade to skewer it through the neck.

  He cast around, wild, lost. It occurred to me that despite the blood spilling down our chest, soaking scarlet into our nightshirt, I felt no pain.

  ‘Jorg! Wake up!’ Katherine’s voice in my ear, the warmth of her breath on my neck, the rumble of the carriage behind her.

  No.

  Hool turned to follow on.

  No.

  I pushed the image of the dart into his eyes, hanging to him by fingertips.

  He reached to pull it free. The thing held tight, tenting his flesh around it as he tugged. Just a thorn! One sharp yank, rip it out barbs and all, let it bleed clean. And he did.

  ‘God damn it!’ He spat blood, looked around again. ‘Where the hell?’ I felt his lips move, felt Katherine shaking me half a thousand miles away.

  Images from his dream got him moving again. Things he’d seen with his own sleeping eyes. The door sealing the vaults, a third ghoul, maybe more entering the Ancrath tombs. I fed him my anger too, burning against the numbness that would be tingling in his fingers by now.

  Not so far ahead, the sound of a hammer striking iron, again and again.

  Somehow I hung on as he ran, leaving the dying glow of the broken lamp behind us. A hard left into darkness and ahead of us, in the stolen burial chambers of the House of Or, another glow. Slower now. Slow, up the steps to Mother’s tomb, the intruders’ light catching gleams from Hool’s blade, still slick with the black blood of ghouls.

  And there in the light of a single lantern, a third ghoul and three dead men, their stained flesh marked with the scale tattoos of Brettan sailors, all of them watching the fifth of their party, a pale man, black-cloaked, black-cowled, kneeling by the smaller of the two sarcophagi, chipping with hammer and chisel at the runes set around its lid.

  To his credit Hool made no challenge or battle-cry. He moved in behind them without hesitation, lined up his swing, and carved halfway through the ghoul’s head. Even as Hool attacked I wondered at the dead men watching. The minds of such things are filled with the worst of what once lived there, and idle curiosity is not a sin, at least not one dark enough to return to a corpse. And yet they watched the tomb, avid, careless. Hool wrenched his blade free and hacked the head from the first of the dead men before the other two turned. Not a perfect swing, but he had some skill, did Master Hool and while his sword kept its fine-honed edge it would forgive him his minor errors.

  The dead men came at him, faster than I had hoped. Released from their fascination with my brother’s tomb they proved a different proposition from the shambling dead more often encountered. Hool chopped the arm from one, taking it at the elbow. The dead man caught Hool’s sword arm in its remaining hand, and the second threw itself at his legs.

  As Hool went down, the necromancer rose.

  I may not have counted Robart Hool high in my esteem, but he died well. He took the sword from his trapped arm and rammed it left-handed through the neck of the corpse man falling to cover him.

  Pinned by the one-armed corpse, grappled at the legs with the other dead man biting flesh from his thigh, Robar
t roared and fought to rise. The necromancer came in fast and touched cold fingers to the wrist of the hand straining to free the sword. All the fight left Robart. Not the pain, not the horror of the dead man’s teeth chewing at the tendon high on his thigh, but the fight. I knew what a necromancer’s touch could do.

  The dead sailor kneeled then stood, its grin crimson, blood dripping from its chin. The eyes that watched us weren’t the eyes it first saw us with. Something looked through them. The necromancer kneeled, paler now, more pale than I thought a man could be.

  ‘My lord,’ he said, not lifting his gaze from the flagstones. ‘My king.’

  ‘My lord!’ Gomst’s shrill voice.

  ‘My king!’ Osser Gant.

  ‘Wake up you fool boy!’ A sharp slap and I found myself looking into Katherine’s eyes.

  ‘Damn you all!’ Miana said, and the baby started howling.

  32

  ‘Hold the baby, Jorg.’

  Miana thrust our son at me, red-faced in his swaddling cloths, drawing breath for a howl. She clambered onto the carriage bench and knelt up at the window to peer out. The walls of Honth made a dark line to the west.

  Little William reached capacity and made the slight shudder that presaged a yell. He couldn’t manage much volume yet but the mewl of babies has been designed with great cunning to tear at an adult’s peace of mind, parents especially. I shoved the knuckle of my little finger into his mouth and let him forget the scream while he gave it a vicious gumming.

  Katherine sat beside me watching my son with unreadable eyes. I hugged him close, my breastplate now strapped to Brath’s saddlebags in its wraps of lambskin and oilcloth. I’d found babies don’t appreciate armour. William spat my knuckle out and drew breath for another attempt at yelling. He’d come into the world red-faced, bald but for black straggles, skinny in the limbs, fat in the body, more of a little pink frog than a person, drooling, malodorous, demanding. Even so I wanted to hold him. That weakness that infects all men, that is part of how we are made, had found a way into me. And yet my own father had set it aside, if it ever once found purchase on him. Perhaps it became easier to set me aside as I grew.

  The howl burst out of William’s little mouth, a sound too big for such small frame. I jiggled him quiet and wondered just how large a stick I’d given the world to beat me with.

  I watched Katherine for a moment. We hadn’t spoken of the night’s dreaming. I had questions and more questions, but I would ask them without an audience and at a time when I could take a moment to settle around whatever answers she might have. She didn’t meet my gaze but studied my son instead. I had worried once that she might mean him harm but it seemed hard to imagine now, with him in my arms.

  ‘There’s someone close by who would kill that child given the slightest chance.’ Katherine looked away as she spoke, her voice low as if it were a small matter, almost lost in the rattle of the carriage.

  ‘What?’ Miana turned from the window grille, fast, eyes bright. I didn’t think she had been listening, but it seemed she paid close attention to whatever passed between my aunt and me.

  ‘If I explain, I want your word that this person will be safe from you and your men, Jorg,’ Katherine said.

  ‘Well that doesn’t sound like me, now does it?’ I made an effort not to let the tension in my arms crush William. Miana reached for her baby, but I held him closer. ‘Suppose you tell anyhow.’

  ‘Katherine!’ Miana reached across me for Katherine’s hand. ‘Please.’

  For a moment I saw the red explosion of Miana’s firebomb in the Haunt’s courtyard. It would not go well if Katherine refused her.

  ‘The man rides under the Pax Gilden,’ Katherine said.

  The guard would kill anyone who tried to attack him, hunt down anyone who succeeded in killing him. Just as they would intervene in, or avenge, any violence in our carriage.

  ‘You’re not Father’s only representative.’ I should have realized from the start, but finding Katherine in the Ancrath carriage threw off my game. ‘He found a replacement for Lord Nossar.’

  She nodded. ‘Jarco Renar.’

  ‘Cousin Jarco.’ I leaned back in my seat and unclenched the fingers knotted in William’s cloths. I’d heard no report of the man since he escaped his failed rebellion in Hodd Town. That had been a year before the Prince of Arrow arrived at my door. We had us a murderous little struggle: civil wars are always brutal, old wounds left too long festering get to spill out their poison over new generations. The battles left the Highlands weakened, short on men, and empty-coffered. I had thought Jarco’s funds came from Arrow, but perhaps Father had been spending my inheritance.

  Nothing would please Jarco more than getting his hands on my son. After all, I killed his brother at Norwood, took his father at the Haunt, and usurped his inheritance. And of course he had his fair share of the family flair for vengeance. I wondered if he were riding as one of the guard. Perhaps he convinced them it was the only way to keep him safe from me. Or they might have him hidden among the straggle of camp-followers reaching back behind us. Finding him would not be easy.

  ‘How could you not have mentioned this before?’ Miana asked, hands whitening around Katherine’s. ‘He could have attacked any of us.’

  ‘William is not under the guard’s protection,’ I said. Jarco wouldn’t sell his life just for a chance at mine, but he could kill my son and have the guard defend him. That might strike him as an opportunity too good to miss. Quite the joke.

  ‘Well put him under the guard’s protection!’ A certain shrillness entered Miana’s voice. Katherine winced, though whether from the volume or beneath Miana’s grip I didn’t know.

  ‘Children may not be advisors or representatives.’ She knew the rules as well as I. On the bench opposite the old men nodded their heads.

  ‘But—’ Miana hushed as I gave her back our child and went to the door. I hung half-out, over the mud and ruts, and hollered for Makin. He rode up sharp enough.

  ‘I want you all around the carriage – Jarco Renar is armoured in gold and looking for a way to reach Prince William.’

  Makin glanced around at the nearest riders. ‘I’ll kill him myself.’

  ‘Don’t. He’s under the Pax.’ As I said it I wondered whose life I might be prepared to spend for Jarco’s death. I waved Makin closer and leaned in so only he would hear me. ‘On second thoughts, I always knew I kept Rike around for a reason. Tell him there’s a hundred gold ducets for him if he kills Jarco. He’d best be prepared to run afterward, though.’

  Makin nodded and hauled on his reins.

  I called after him. ‘A hundred gold and five Araby stallions.’ It seemed fitting somehow.

  ‘You!’ I shouted to the nearest guardsman. ‘Get Harran here.’

  The man nodded his golden helm and spurred off toward the head of the column.

  ‘Give me Makin and Marten and we’ll ride home to the Highlands,’ Miana was saying behind me.

  ‘I would give you Rike and Kent and Gorgoth as well and you still wouldn’t be safe, Miana. We’re too far from home in lands that love us not.’

  By the time Captain Harran drew level, flanked by two other troop captains, Katherine and Miana were arguing in fierce whispers with William interjecting the odd protest.

  Harran lifted his visor. ‘King Jorg.’

  ‘I will speak with Jarco Renar,’ I said.

  ‘Jarco Renar is under my protection. I have advised him not to show himself to you, in order to avoid any unpleasantness.’

  ‘Oh I can assure you, Captain, there will be far more unpleasantness if you don’t bring him before me.’

  Harran smiled. ‘Jorg, I have nearly five hundred of the emperor’s best soldiers here precisely to make sure that you can’t hurt Jarco Renar and Jarco Renar can’t hurt you. Getting our charges to Vyene is what we do. By my count you have four men with you capable of bearing arms. Best let us get on with our job, no?’

  ‘That’s King Jorg to you, Captain Harr
an,’ I said.

  The four men he mentioned had joined us now. In truth I had three since Gorgoth was his own man and would be as likely to stand with the guard as with me.

  A slap to the carriage’s side brought us to a halt. ‘Would you hand me that, Lord Makin?’ I pointed to the Nuban’s crossbow, tied to Brath’s saddle.

  I took the bow, stepped down into the mud and crossed to the bank beside the road. The weight of their attention settled on me as I bent to wind the bow.

  ‘The guard here are assigned to protect myself, Lord Makin, and my advisors?’ I didn’t look up.

  ‘Yes,’ Harran said.

  ‘And they would offer me violence under what circumstances?’ I knew the rules. I wanted to hear Harran speak them.

  ‘Quarrel,’ I said, hand outstretched. Makin slapped an iron bolt into my palm.

  ‘If you attempted to harm any of the Hundred, their advisors, or delegates.’ Harran’s stallion gave a nervous whinny and stamped.

  ‘Makin, if you would be good enough to foreswear the need for any protection from me, as my banner-man. Just so there’s no confusion.’ I set the bolt in place.

  ‘I do so swear,’ he said.

  I looked up, held Harran’s dark stare, took his measure one last time. ‘I like you well enough, Harran, but my son is in that carriage and Jarco Renar will like as not try to kill him since he is not under your protection. So, I need to speak with my cousin in order to reach some arrangement.’

  ‘I’ve explained King Jorg, that cannot—’

  I shot Harran in the face. He half-lurched, half-leapt from the saddle, caught by his stirrups he came to rest at an odd angle, almost jutting from the side of his horse. The beast took flight, cantering back along the line, dragging Harran through the leafless hedges. His golden helm caught in the thorns and ripped free, blood dripping from it.

  ‘Quarrel,’ I said, hand out. Makin supplied one.

  I started to wind the bow again.

  ‘Captain Rosson is it? And Captain Devers?’ My question caught them with blades half-drawn. ‘Why are you baring steel at me when your single most holy duty to the empire is my protection?’ All around me the guard were reaching for their swords, others urging their horses in closer to discover the cause of unrest.