King of Thorns Page 25

  I splashed on with the live Brothers behind me and the dead Brothers behind them. Back and to my right, Fat Burlow moved to block Rike. I raced on, finding a low ridge of firmer ground. Turning, I saw Rike’s broadsword shear through Burlow’s arm. Burlow grabbed him with his remaining hand, but Makin cut that off and both men charged on, slowing as they hit softer ground and starting to wade. Makin lost a boot to the sucking mud but he made it to my side. Our panicked horses ran in various directions; some cantered after us, Brath among them, but I saw two horses hit the mud and start to sink, rearing and plunging as if they thought they might win through.

  Some yards away a mud-pit began to boil with activity. Corpse after corpse clambered from it as if they had been stacked fathoms deep and with unsettling intimacy.

  I led on. It seemed that whilst the undead lacked fear and would literally need to be hacked apart before they stopped trying to kill us, they were at least slow. On an open field we would have left them in our dust. In the swamp the match turned out to be more even. A pervasive aura of lingering death infects the mud in the Cantanlona bogs. Somehow the mire itself is half-alive, or half-dead depending on your perspective, and it supported the undead, vomiting them up, keeping them from sinking.

  The corpses from the mud-pit managed to intercept us when the firm ground swung to the left.

  “Keep moving!” I shouted.

  Makin sliced one across the chest, his training misleading him for once. The creature didn’t notice the wound and grappled him with muddy arms. Rike didn’t bother with his sword. He set his boot to the stomach of the corpse-man in his path with such force that he threw it yards back, felling another before it reached us. Of all the Brothers, Red Kent proved best suited to the work. His Norse axe sheared off grasping limbs, weaving a savage pattern that left the bog scattered with hands, arms, and heads.

  We raced on with the creatures at our heels, silent in their determination to catch and dismember us, just the noise of their splashing and our panting. At one point a mud-grey army of undead hunted our trail, but each mile left them farther behind us until at last they dropped from sight.

  I called a halt on a low mound that offered a firm footing and an elevated view of the bogs. A ring of weathered stone indicated the place had once been a burial, some local chieftain perhaps, but the grave looked to have been emptied years ago and I felt no more death there than in any of the surrounding mire. My anger had kept pace with me during the long chase. Chella had kept the Nuban’s corpse as her plaything for more than half a year. I didn’t know if anything of the man remains when necromancy animates his flesh, but the possibility of his suffering, and the horror of it if he did, made me swear revenge. I had only made one such vow before and then as now I made it without words and with every intention to tear the world apart if that were needed to see it through.

  “I don’t want to spend another night in this place,” Makin said.

  “Really?” Rike growled, sitting on the largest of the stones. I’d never heard him use sarcasm before. I guessed he must have been saving it for extreme circumstances.

  “Stand a moment, Rike,” I said.

  And he did. I lifted the point of my sword to his side. With a stab and a twist I took Burlow’s severed hand away, tearing off the patch of tunic it had a grip on, and flicked it into the swamp.

  “We’ve wandered into hell,” Grumlow said with conviction. “We got lost and now we’re in hell.” He had mud plastered up one side of his face and blood clotting in his moustache, trickles of it making crimson trails from nose to lip.

  “Hell smells better,” I said.

  With the horses around us the mound was crowded and our sightlines blocked. I pushed the grey aside, slapping her rump. Of the five horses left to us she was the only one relaxed enough to crop at the short grass.

  “We should go,” Makin said.

  We should, but where to? The horizon offered nothing. Except, perhaps…

  “Is that the sea?” I pointed. To the east a hint of black or blue lined the farthest reaches of the marsh.

  A sharp cry cut off anyone inclined to answer. I spun toward the sound. Just behind us, thigh-deep in water, chest-deep in rushes, Chella held Young Sim by the throat and head. She took another step back away from the mound, dragging Sim. It seemed that she had done something to him, to his neck maybe, for his arms hung limp at his side though he watched us with wild eyes. We called him Young Sim and he had perhaps sixteen years, but when it came to killing he was an old hand and he would not have gone easy without good reason.

  “Jorg, you shouldn’t run from me,” Chella said. The water had washed away the mud though it couldn’t take the bog-stain from her skin, the colour of old teak. The Celtic patterns scrolling across her were deep-set too, not the paint I had once thought them. A needle must have placed those swirls and knots along her arms, reaching across her sides.

  “I don’t want any part of you, necromancer.” I still held the Nuban’s bow, though I hadn’t reloaded it. I aimed at her, assuming she wouldn’t pay close attention to the number of bolts in place. “Whatever power I consumed is fading from me. Slower than I would like it to fade, but it will be gone and I won’t be sorry. I want no part of you or your dirty trade.”

  She smiled. “The Dead King won’t let you go, Jorg. He’s gathering all our kind to him. Black ships wait to take us to the Drowned Isles.”

  I made no reply. My anger had subsided once I vowed to destroy Chella. Vengeance is patient when it needs to be and she sought to use the Brothers against me to enrage me, to set me chasing her into the drowning pools. I didn’t let her know how deep her hooks had sunk.

  “You’re not going to ask me to release your brother, Jorg?” She dragged Sim a yard farther back.

  Row had an arrow trained on her and Grumlow looked ready to throw his knife this time. Grumlow had a soft spot for Sim: fear wouldn’t stay his hand.

  “So, you have my brother. Eat his heart and we will be even. Back to where we started,” I said. I knew she wouldn’t be letting go of Sim. She just wanted me to ask.

  “Oh, you can’t go back, Jorg. You should know that. You can never go back. Not even if every trace of necromancy left you. Look!” She made a quick change of grip and jerked Sim’s head to the right. Far too far to the right. The grating of bone set my teeth on edge. “Annnnnd…” She rotated his head slowly back to face us. “He’s back. But he’s not the same now, is he?”

  “Bitch!” Row released his arrow. Whether his hand trembled or Chella moved faster than I could see I don’t know, but the arrow ended up jutting from Sim’s eye.

  “Now see what you’ve done.” Her red mouth smiling, her eyes seductive, and she whispered in Sim’s ear.

  Grumlow threw his knife but Chella was already falling. It may have cut her, but the waters closed over her before I could tell.

  Sim, despite his arrow and his broken neck, remained standing. And then he took an uncertain step toward us. The clear water between the rushes clouded as the mud below began to stir.

  “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.