King of Thorns Read online

Keppen slipped into the crack and the Watch started to file after him. They had a journey of three or four hundred yards ahead of them, most of it through natural caves carved by ancient streams, the last hundred yards through a tunnel hacked out by men with picks in hand and candles to light their work.

  I glanced at the timepiece on my wrist, starting to get the habit again. A quarter past two.

  “Come with me,” I told Marten. Makin and Captain Harold followed too.

  We crept across to the rocks that hid us from the slopes below, and edged out to a position that offered a view of the archers on the ridge. I pushed the watch up my wrist so my sleeve hid it. It never pays to sparkle when you’re hoping to be unobserved.

  “There are a lot of them,” Makin said.

  “Yes.” In fact even without a single foot-soldier, just with archers, the Prince of Arrow had brought with him four men for every man I had under arms.

  We watched. They weren’t raining arrows on the Haunt, just picking targets of opportunity and making sure the men at my walls kept their heads down. They could raise an arrow storm if the need arose, but why waste arrows?

  We kept watching.

  “Fascinating,” Makin said.

  “Wait,” I said. I looked at my watch again.

  “For—” Makin stopped asking. A black stain spread from beneath the ridge.

  “What is it?” Harold asked.

  The archer ranks started to break. A wave of confusion rippling through the order.

  “Trolls,” I said.

  “What?” Makin cried. “How? Who? How many?”

  At our distance it was hard to see the detail but it looked messy. The rocks ran red.

  Makin slapped fist to palm. “I smelled them back there at the entrance. The same stink you had on you when Gorgoth brought you down that day.” He frowned again. “I guess this explains all those goats we kept buying in—that stuff about holding out for a long siege never made much sense.”

  “Gorgoth brought them south,” I said. “I’ve offered them sanctuary in the Matteracks, though possibly it was the promise of goats that sealed the deal…He has a hundred and twenty with him. They’ve been tunnelling. Making covered exits below that ridge.”

  Marten almost smiled. “That would be why you refused to listen when I begged you to defend it.”

  “They can’t win,” Makin said. “Not with a hundred. Not even trolls!”

  “No. But look at them. What a mess they’re making, neh? As Maical would say, it helps to have the elephant of surprise on your side.” I slid back down into the shadow of the rock. “Right, let’s go.”

  Marten joined me. “Why now though, and how did you know?”

  “Ah. What you should ask is how Gorgoth knew. An hour after the avalanche I told him. And he agreed—but how in hell did he know when the avalanche happened?”

  At the sally port the last of the Watch were stepping into the dark.

  “I need you to hold here, Marten,” I said. “Come what may.”

  “We will hold. I don’t forget what you did, and my men will follow where I lead,” Marten said.

  It seemed a small thing that I had done. A toy and something for the pain, to ease a little girl’s passing from the world. I hadn’t even done it for good reasons.

  Makin set a hand on Marten’s shoulder as he moved by. They shared a bond these two. Two lost daughters. I saw how deep that ran—so deep I’d known Makin half my life before he even spoke of it. I wondered if I were made for such emotions or if I were just the clever, shallow boy most people saw. These men carried dead daughters through the years. I had a dead child whose name I had lost, who dogged my trail because I would not shoulder the burden of my guilt. For a small box it surely held a weight of memory. Perhaps more than I could carry.

  We trekked the cave trails, worn smooth by years of use. I held a lantern taken from a store just inside the entrance. It flared brighter as I took it, and my cheek pulsed. I’d had me a touch of that magic ever since Gog burned me. I took Ferrakind as an object lesson in not pursuing those paths.

  I paused from time to time to gaze upon galleries of stone forests that stretched away left and right. Stalagmites and stalactites Lundist had called them, though he only had pictures in books, and frankly those looked dull as hell. I’m not sure what the difference is—maybe the big ones are stalagmites. Lundist said they grow, but I’ve never seen it happen. I do know that in the light of flames, beneath immeasurable weight of rock, they hold a beauty that cannot be communicated.

  For long moments the wonder of the living rock held me and when it let me go I found myself alone, an island of light in the ancient dark. Quick glances along the path confirmed it. No men of the watch, no Brothers, not even footsteps in the distance.

  Something is wrong.

  “Jorg.” And Sageous stepped from behind a pillar of stone, the light within him writing his tattoos across the walls in shadow, sliding, moving, wrapping over every fold and curve of the cavern.

  “Heathen.” I kept my eyes on his. “You have more churchmen you need killed perhaps?”

  He smiled. “You’ve been so hard to reach, Jorg. A hedge of thorns around all your dreams.” A frown. “…or a box? Is it a box, Jorg? There’s another hand in this. Someone has been keeping you from me.”

  I kept my hands still, my eyes on his, but I felt the weight at my hip and his gaze wandered there.

  “Interesting,” he said. “But no matter. Now we’re so close I can touch you again.”

  “Have you come to play me, heathen? To set me on the path of your choosing?” I drew steel but he seemed unimpressed. “Don’t tell me—you’re not here again?”

  Again the smile. He inclined his head a fraction. “I’m beyond your reach, Jorg, and you still walk the path I placed you on long ago. All you have left to choose is the manner of your death. I took Katherine from you. She would have made you strong. Yin to your yang, if you like. And now you are weak, and she serves instead to place in my hands an Arrow I can point where I will.”

  “No.” I shook my head and took a step toward him, careful of my footing.

  In the caves a wrong step can leave you broken at the bottom of a long fall. Yet however I chose my steps the heathen had always made me doubt my footing. He carried doubt with him, doubt of self, doubt of motives, the kind of uncertainty that eats at a man like cancer.

  “No.” I repeated myself, hunting confidence. “Gloating is for fools. If I were playing your game you would leave me to play it.” I quested toward him with the point of my sword. “Perhaps those gentle touches didn’t work quite so well as you had hoped and you come in desperation to turn me more boldly from the path I’m walking. Gloating is for fools, and I have never counted you a fool.”

  The light flickered across his skin. “You can’t win, boy. You can’t win. So why are you still here? What are you planning? Where are you hiding your secrets?” His eyes fell to the box again, though it made but the slightest bulge at my hip.

  A quick step and I thrust at him. He hissed as the blade bit in, with no more resistance than if only his robe hung before me.

  “I’m not here!” Through gritted teeth, as if insistence made it true. And he was gone.

  “Jorg?” Makin at my side, a frown on his brow, his hand on my arm. “Jorg?”

  “Heh. Dreaming on my feet.” I shook my head. “Lead on!”

  * * *

  The sally tunnels connect to separate cellars beneath the Haunt, their exits disguised as huge wine barrels. I elbowed my way among the Watch and found Hobbs.

  “Do what you can about the ram,” I said. “It looks to be well covered but it needs fresh men to swing it, so shoot a few of the bastards as they come up to take a turn. Also, you’ll find there’s not much incoming at the moment. At least not of the pointy kind. They’ll still be slinging rocks at us. So take advantage and just kill as many of his men as you can.”

  Next I took myself to the courtyard where my levies, subjects, and banner
men waited, crowded rank upon rank before the gatehouse. Knights from Morrow to the left of the portcullis, armour gleaming, swords in hand. To the right more knights, plate-armoured, the noblest sons of Hodd Town, my capital down in the valleys to the north. No doubt they had come to win the king’s favour and honour for their houses. Young men in the main, soft with gold and more used to lance and tourney than blood and ruin. I saw Sir Elmar of Golden among them, his armour radiant as his name implied. A warrior, that one, despite his finery.

  They had some strength among them. Crowded on the gallery and stairs, crossbow men from the Westfast under Lord Scoolar, hard-eyed and wind-burned. Packed before the splintering gate, men of the Hauntside, tough fighters from the hills, in leather and iron, axes honed, round wooden shields layered in goat-hide. Behind these, warriors from Far Range, their iron helms patterned with silver and tin, each man armed with hammer and hatchet. And to the rear, ranked before the keep wall, Cennat shield dancers, their warboards taller than a man.

  I walked among them, Makin at my shoulder, amid the stink and heave of bodies, the tension a taste in the air at once both sour and sweet. I hadn’t words for them, no kingly gestures, no speech to shout above the screams from beyond the wall and the crash of the ram. When you fight alongside Brothers you bind them with word and deed. When you fight among subjects you are a figure, a form, an idea. Men will die for many things; lives hoarded with care can be spent for the strangest of reasons. What bound us here, we men of the Highlands, was defiance. All men will dig their heels in if pushed enough. All men will reach the point that they say “no” for no reason other than opposition, for no reason other than the word fits their mouth, and tastes as good as it sounds. And in the Highlands, among our mountains, the heights breed men who will give no single inch without defiance.

  I walked between the men of the Highlands, the old and young, some bearded, others clean-cheeked, some pale, some red, the trembling and the steady, and came to stand before the portcullis, iron-bound timbers splintered, the rush of the ram beyond, the savage cries of the hundred wrestling it toward me. My fingers found my knife hilt and I pulled it clear. Laid against my unburned cheek the metal felt like ice. The portcullis shuddered and groaned before the ram. Men of Arrow screamed and died as missiles rained upon them. The knife blade cut skin soft as a kiss. I took the blood on scarlet fingers and wiped it over the gate timbers. I turned my back on the gate, crouched before my men, and smeared a line of blood across the flagstones. As I returned to the keep I set my hand to a score of warriors, the eager ones, the ones in who I saw an echo of the same hunger that made me want that gate open every bit as much as those men on the ram.

  “King’s blood!” Sir Elmar of Golden raised his axe, the crimson smear of my fingers left across his shining helm.

  “King’s blood!” A hairy Hauntside warrior pressed the heel of his hand to the red imprint I set across his brow.

  “King’s blood!” A Cennat dancer twirled the huge shield where my handprint sat scarlet across the white moon of his house.

  “King’s blood!”

  The roar pulsed back and forth, following us within the keep. A king is a sigil, not a man but an idea. I thought they had the idea now.

  I took myself up to my throne-room with Makin at my side, and called for my table-knights, Red Kent, and the captain of the contingent from the House Morrow, Lord Jost.

  Lord Jost arrived last, with a second knight and Miana. Queen Miana I supposed I should call her. She still wore her wedding dress, though with the train and veils taken off and a shawl set with pearls added against the cold. Lord Jost looked rather embarrassed by her presence at my council of war.

  “Gentlemen,” I said. “My lady.”

  I sat in the throne. Slumped would be more accurate. It felt good to take the weight off my feet. I’d done more running and climbing and descending than I wanted and was ready to sleep for a week.

  “How many of the enemy did you kill, and at what loss?” Miana asked. The men had been waiting for me to speak. She felt no such need. I would have asked the same question.

  “About six thousand for the loss of two hundred,” I said.

  “A thirty to one ratio. Better than the rate of twenty to one needed.” To hear her high sweet voice recite the statistics of our body count seemed wrong.

  “True. But they were two hundred of my very best, and I have played the aces from my hand.”

  “And Chancellor Coddin has not returned,” Miana said. She was remarkably well informed for a little girl.

  A pang of something ran through me at that. I saw Coddin once more in the tomb we made for him. “He’s safer than we are,” I said. He would probably live longer too. He would linger.

  I took a goblet of watered wine from a page and a plate with crusted bread and goat cheese.

  “And your plans?” she asked.

  I blew through my lips. “We will have to place our faith in stone and mortar, and hope that in the time they buy us, fortune decides to smile our way.” The wine tasted like heaven and made me dizzy after one sip.

  “Perhaps my new father-in-law will send us aid?” Miana said, her smile faint and years too old for her.

  “I was hoping something similar myself,” I said.

  More than in muscle heaped on bone, Brother Rike’s strength springs from the ability to hate the inanimate.

  39

  Four years earlier

  “She’s gone, yes?” Makin shaded his eyes against the sunrise and squinted back across the marsh. We stood on rolling scrubland now with yellow rock breaking through in sandy patches here and there.

  “I hope so,” I said. Part of me wanted Chella to find destruction at my hands, the personal touch, but perhaps she ended there in the marsh amongst the burning dead. I hadn’t felt it. No sense of satisfaction, but my uncle’s death had taught me that revenge is far less sweet than it promises to be. An empty meal, however long you take over it.

  We took to horse for the first time in what seemed an age. Rike on Row’s roan since his own plough-horse proved too heavy for its own good in the bogs. Kent and Makin on their horses. Grumlow riding double with me since he and I were the lightest of the Brothers and Brath the strongest of the nags.

  The sour stink of the marshes followed us for miles. Black mud caking on our clothes, drying grey and flaking away. More persistent than stink or mud, the image of Chella as the flames rose around her, and the echo of her last words. The Dead King sails.

  In three days we came by moorland and scrub, then by forgotten roads, and finally by country tracks, to the free port of Barlona. Rike made ceaseless complaint about his sunburn until I convinced him to smear pig-shit over the worst affected areas. For some reason it seemed to help though I hadn’t intended it to. Suggestion can be a powerful thing.

  The ancient walls shimmered in the summer heat as we approached. They must have been impressive a thousand years ago. Now only the base of the walls remained, twenty foot high and just as thick, spilling black stone in great heaps for the peasants to raid to make huts and boundary walls for their fields.

  I liked the city from the moment we rode in. The air held exotic scents, spices and cooking smoke that made my stomach growl. The people thronged, loud in voice and clothing, bright silks, garish jewellery made of glass and base metals, flesh of all colours on display in wide swathes. Men and women as light as me, as dark as the Nuban, and all shades in between. None as pale as Sindri and Duke Alaric though. Those, I think the sun would melt.

  Music came from almost every corner in as many shades as the people. It seemed that the citizens walked in time to the beat and pulse of a thousand drums, horns, voices. I’d not heard such sounds before, so many strange melodies, some reminding me of the marching beats the Nuban used to slap against his thigh as we walked and which he elaborated on around the campfire. Others held remembrances of the curious atonal humming Tutor Lundist lapsed into in empty moments.

  A port is an open ear to the world, a
mouth ready for new flavours. Approaching my fifteenth year I felt more than ready to explore the wideness of the world that Barlona offered up.

  “You know, Makin, you can take ship from here to almost any place you’ve ever heard of and a thousand that you haven’t,” I said.

  “Ships make me hurl.” Makin looked as if he were remembering the taste.

  “You don’t like them?”

  “It’s the waves. I get seasick. I vomit from one shore to the next. I was nearly sick crossing the Rhyme.”

  “Well, that’s good to know.” With Makin you can keep digging and find a new fact year on year. I hadn’t known he’d ever crossed an ocean, or even travelled under sail.

  “How is that good to know?” He frowned.

  “Well, the only way to get to the Horse Coast is by sea and I’m going alone. Knowing what a bad sailor you are just makes it easier to send you back to the Haunt.”

  “We can ride there,” Makin said. “It’s less than a hundred miles.”

  “Through the Duchy of Aramas and then the lands of King Philip the nine hundredth,” I said.

  “Thirty-second,” Makin corrected.

  “Whatever. The point is that those are not places men like us can pass unnoticed, whereas a ship will sail me right to my grandfather’s doorstep in a day or two.”

  “So we take a ship and I coat the decks in vomit. What’s the problem?”

  “The problem, dear Makin, is that I don’t want Rike there, or Grumlow, or Kent. I don’t even want you there. I want to make my own introductions in my own time. This is family business and I’ll do it my way.”

  “That tends to mean everyone dies.” Makin grinned.

  “Maybe, but I don’t need you there for that either. Just get them back to the Haunt. We’ve lost too many on this trip. I won’t say we’ve lost good men, but ones that I would rather have kept. Though if you misplace Rike on the way back, that would be fine.”

  “This is a bad idea, Jorg.” Makin had that stubborn look of his, lips pressed tight, a vertical line between his brows.