Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3) Page 30

  ‘Wouldn’t an emperor grate on you? Don’t you prefer to rule the desert with a free hand?’

  Ibn Fayed shook his head, croaking a dry laugh. ‘I live on the very edge of the Holy Empire. To the south, as far away as Vyene, is another emperor, a Cerani emperor, and his domain reaches to my borders, as vast as our broken empire ever was at its heights. Soon enough, maybe not in my lifetime but surely before my grandson takes this chair, the Cerani and their allied tribes will come out of the desert and swallow Liba whole. That is unless someone is crowned at Vyene to remake our strength.’

  I passed a month in the desert city. I learned what I could of their ways. For some weeks I studied in the mathema, even pieced together a little of their door. Qalasadi returned the view-ring to my keeping, on the understanding that it must never enter the palace and must leave Liba with me.

  I sat one evening in the mathema tower, closeted alone in a windowless chamber on the floor behind the door marked ‘epsilon’. A simple earthenware oil lamp lit the book before me, equations and more equations. I have the head for mathematics but no love for it. I’ve seen a formula bring tears to Kalal’s eyes with its elegance and the sheer beauty of its symmetries. I grasped the formula, or thought I did, but it didn’t move me. Whatever poetry such things hold I am deaf to it.

  On the table beside the book, the view-ring, a shiny and inert lump since the explosion, or since Qalasadi’s intervention, although he said they did nothing to it. I yawned and slammed the book hard enough to make the flame jerk and shudder, and to set the ring dancing like a spun coin at the very last of its rotations. But unlike a coin the ring kept its oscillations going. I watched it, hypnotized.

  ‘Jorg?’ and Fexler’s image rose above the ring, painted in whites as always, not quite opaque. If the Builders had set themselves the task of recreating ghosts from the stories told to children they could have done the job no better.

  ‘Who’s asking?’

  He focused on me as I spoke, his image growing sharper. ‘Can’t you see me?’

  ‘I can see you.’

  ‘Then you recognize me. Fexler Brews.’

  I laid my hand flat across the book. ‘It says here that a prediction will diverge from the truth. The further the prediction is carried, the larger the discrepancy. Wraps it all up in statistics and bounds of course. But the message is clear enough. You’re a prediction. I doubt you’re anything like the man I saw die any more.’

  ‘Untrue,’ Fexler said. ‘I have the original data. I don’t need to rely on fading memories. Fexler Brews is alive in me as true and clear as ever.’

  I shook my head and watched him. The shadows danced everywhere but across him. On me, on the walls, the ceiling, only Fexler constant, lit by his own light.

  ‘You can’t grow if you’re constantly defined by this collection of frozen moments that you keep returning to. And if you can’t grow, you’re not alive. So either you’re Fexler, and like him you’re dead. Or you’re alive, but you’re someone else. Something else.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s me we’re talking about?’ Fexler raised a brow – very human.

  ‘Ah …’ It closed on me like steel jaws. The worst traps are the ones we lay for ourselves. All these years and it took a nothing, a web of numbers, to show me to myself. I could count on one hand the brief and personal passion plays that nailed me to my past. The carriage and the thorns. The hammer and Justice burning. The bishop. Father’s knife jutting from my chest. And at my hip, in a copper box, perhaps one more. ‘I liked you better before, Fexler. Why are you here?’

  ‘I came to learn your plans,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t watch me enough to know them?’

  ‘I have been … busy, elsewhere.’

  ‘Vyene is calling me,’ I said. ‘I mean to take ship to Mazeno and travel by road to the Gilden Gates. It will probably be a quicker return journey than the one that brought me here. And besides, I have a memory from a fever dream, a memory of you asking me to go there, something about the throne, and my view-ring, only you were calling it a different name. Control ring? Is that a true memory?’

  ‘It is a true memory, but I won’t speak of it now. It is probable others are listening. Go to Vyene: it will be a good education.’

  I sat back, ran my eye across the books ranked along shelves from floor to ceiling, all that knowledge. ‘These mathmagicians, they’re the champions of that effort to recivilize us aren’t they, Fexler? The start of a new understanding, so we can repair what the Builders built.’

  ‘One of several such starts.’ He nodded.

  ‘I’ve looked at the scraps left from your time. Almost nothing was ever written down …’

  ‘It was written into machines, into memory. You just lack the means to read it.’ Fexler looked around at the books too, as if he needed to use his eyes to see them. One of many deceptions, no doubt.

  ‘I’ve looked at those scraps and nowhere does it speak of heaven and hell, of a life beyond death, of church or mosque or any place of worship.’

  Fexler looked down at me, floating as he was a foot above the desk, his head near touching the ceiling. ‘Few among us concerned ourselves with religion. We had answers that didn’t require faith.’

  ‘But I’ve spoken with an angel.’ I frowned. ‘At least I think I have. And for damn sure I’ve reached into the deadlands chasing after pieces of men’s souls. How can you—’

  ‘For a clever boy you can be very stupid, Jorg.’ Something in his voice carried a faint echo of that angel, timeless, tolerant.

  ‘What?’ Spoken too loud. My anger is never more than a moment away. It makes a fool of me more times than I can say.

  ‘Our greatest work was to change the role of the observer. We put power into the hands of men, directly into their hands. Too much power as it turned out. If the raw strength of one man’s will, the right man’s will, can bring fire from nothing, part the waters, pulverize stone, command winds. What then of the unfocused desire and expectation of millions?’

  ‘You—’

  ‘Your afterlife is what you expect it to be, what the thousands, the millions around you expect, what legend builds, told, retold, refined, evolving. In this place, amongst the sands, they fashion themselves a different paradise and different paths to it, some dark, some light. All of it is fabrication, constructed over the reality my people lived in. Whatever waited for a man after his death in those times, it was not mentioned in our calculations. Our priests, when they could find anyone to listen, described something more subtle, more profound, and more wonderful than the mishmash of medieval superstition your kind have built upon.’

  ‘We made it?’ It didn’t seem possible. ‘We built heaven and hell?’

  ‘Oh yes. If your priests ever discover what power lies at their fingertips with the will of their flock behind them … well pray that they do not, or every word of fire and brimstone, of last judgments and devils with pitchforks, will become the gospel truth, rising up on all sides. Why do you think we have worked so hard to reinforce the church’s hatred of “magic” and its practice?’

  The worst of it was that I believed him. It sounded like truth. Without pause, I took the book of calculus and set it down on the view-ring, hard. Fexler’s image vanished like a spot of light when you put your hand over the hole that casts it. There’s only so much truth I can listen to in one go.

  Qalasadi and Yusuf came to the edge of Hamada to see me off into the desert. I had made my farewells to Ibn Fayed in the coolness of his throne room, accepting gifts of gold, diamonds, amber, and of clove-spice for the journey. ‘There is always pain,’ the caliph told me, closing my hand around the spice.

  Omal waited with the camels, ten altogether, three tall, white ones – gifts to me from the caliph – good breeders and from fine bloodlines by all accounts. To me they were as ill-tempered, ungainly, and foul-smelling as the rest of them. Along with Omal we had three more drovers and a guard of five Ha’tari.

  ‘Safe journey, King J
org.’ Qalasadi bowed, one hand folded across his stomach.

  ‘I’ve yet to have one of those, but let’s hope this will be it.’ I grinned and inclined my head a fraction.

  ‘Next time you will come to my house, meet my wife, see what I have to suffer,’ Yusuf said, a smile on him, eyes bright.

  ‘Next time I will.’ I turned to go, but paused. ‘And the Prince of Arrow? Don’t your predictions tell you to erase me so that he might have a clear run?’ For a cold moment I wondered if the nine men accompanying me had orders to bury my corpse in a dune.

  Yusuf’s grin became a little fixed and he shot an embarrassed glance at Qalasadi. The older man laced his fingers and brought both hands to his chin.

  ‘Our projections show no significant probability of you impeding the Prince of Arrow, King Jorg. As such we are rescued from having to wrestle with the problems of the one over the many and the many over the one.’

  ‘If he comes to Renar, Jorg, don’t get in his way.’ An edge of pleading in Yusuf’s voice. ‘It would not be wise.’

  ‘Well.’ The revelation left me a little nonplussed despite saving me from conflict with the mathmagicians. ‘That’s good then.’ And I went to mount my camel.

  37

  Chella’s Story

  Keres had left a brittle feeling in her wake. The carriage creaked like an old man’s joints and every place she had touched lay rough, discoloured, dry enough to suck the moisture from skin.

  ‘She’ll find her way back to the Dead King.’ Chella turned away from the road, Kai kept close at her shoulder.

  The lichkin would follow fractures and fault-lines, places where the veils hung threadbare between the world and death’s dry dominion. She would travel in coffins, shadow the sick, drift with plague spores, and in time she would enter the Dead King’s court, wrapped again in unquiet spirits, snatched up on her journey.

  ‘We should be moving, delegate.’ Captain Axtis of the Gilden Guard had marshalled his troops a mile down the road whilst the necromancers tended to Keres’ needs. Although the guard remained ignorant of the lichkin its presence unsettled them, sapping morale. Axtis seemed keen to move on, to leave Gottering to the dead.

  ‘Let us do that.’ Chella hauled herself back into the carriage. ‘Be as quick as you like, driver.’

  They lurched into motion even before Kai shut the door behind him. He caught the side of the bench to stop the fall carrying him into Chella’s lap, and held himself for a moment, twelve inches separating their swaying bodies. Her pulse beat fierce in the veins of her wrists.

  Swift hands. For a moment Chella savoured the thought of such entanglement. Kai found his balance and his seat at the same time she pushed him away – a mutual decision. She closed her hands, nails sharp in her palms, and put her head back against the rest. What would I want with a pretty blond thing like him in any case? Unseasoned meat.

  ‘We will be in Honth soon?’ Kai asked.

  ‘Yes.’ He knew that. The living just liked to chatter – they would spend long enough silent in the grave. The same need twisted her lips, wanting her to add more. She pressed them tight.

  ‘Then along the Danoob,’ Kai said. ‘Have you ever seen it, Chella?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They say if you’re in love the waters look blue.’

  Before Jorg she had never travelled, never strayed from Gelleth, just that short journey from Jonholt to the mountain. A scant few miles in three lifetimes, but oh the things she had seen on that trip.

  The span of three lives spent digging into death, unravelling mysteries, stepping away from life in all its mess and clutter and squabbles. And here she sat, rattling her way toward the heart of empire, sick with being alive, stomach roiling at the jolting motion and at the thought of what lay ahead. Not until the Dead King announced her as his representative and pressed five voting seals into her hands had she ever doubted his genius. Now she knew it for insanity.

  At the town of Wendmere Captain Axtis halted the column for lunch. The guard set their five times fifty warhorses, their pack animals, and the steeds of the column-followers to grazing in the meadows, careless of who farmed them or what need the grass was set against. The ragged tail of followers still straggled in as Kai and Chella seated themselves beside the hearth in Wendmere’s finest inn. Chella noted the armourers’ wagons rolling by, the carts of the farriers, the troop’s leather workers, the seamstresses’ tiny wagon. Kai paid more attention to the whores, an ever-changing population trailing the guard, girls on mules, girls in open buggies and gigs, more in Onsa’s wheel-house. Each band with some cut-faced rogue to guard and guide and chivvy and negotiate. Chella could almost see the chains of hunger and misery that towed them behind the golden men of Vyene.

  Guards brought in goblets and platters in their velvet-lined cases from the goods train, each piece set with the imperial eagle. Only the Gilden Guard themselves could be trusted to serve their wards, to serve the Hundred or their representatives. Chella found herself wondering if these gleaming warriors could handle their swords as well as they handled the silver cutlery being set before her.

  ‘What do you think of the empire’s elite, Kai? You served in an army, did you not?’

  Kai lowered his goblet from wine-darkened lips. He frowned at the man standing to attention ready to refill it. ‘Who says the guard are “elite”? Every petty noble’s third son who’s too dumb to make it in the clergy gets shipped off to Vyene where each grows fat on bribes as an over-valued “watchman”, and each fourth year they get to go on a little trip to collect the Hundred. Pretty armour doesn’t make a warrior.’

  To their credit, the men around them hid their offence well.

  ‘I guess the truth lies somewhere between,’ Chella said. ‘I hear they train hard, these men of Vyene. They are, perhaps, as well-forged as a weapon can be without fire.’

  She looked out, through the distortion of the small and puddle-paned windows, across the rooftops, to distant smoke. Their true protection stalked out there somewhere, Thantos, more cautious than his sister and more deadly.

  Keres had been skinned, though! A chill crept over Chella, despite the fire, despite the wine. If the lichkin could have told them what happened – her mind would be at better ease. A trouble named is a trouble tamed.

  Captain Axtis came in, stamping against the cold and brushing rain off the shoulders of his cloak.

  ‘Tell me, Captain,’ Chella said. ‘When were the guard last called on to defend the Gilden Gates, when did they last take to the battlefield?’

  ‘Sixtieth year of the Interregnum, Madam Delegate.’ Without hesitation. ‘The battle of Crassis Plains, against the Holy Roman army of the false emperor Manzal.’

  A generation ago. ‘Were you even born then, Axtis?’

  ‘I was two years of age, Madam Delegate.’

  And showing grey hairs under that helm today. Chella wondered how they would stand against the dead of her master’s army, the quick and the slow, with the ghouls and the lichkin.

  ‘I came to say we should be moving on if you’re set upon a full escort the whole way to Vyene.’

  ‘Oh we are, Captain.’ Chella set down her goblet and stood. It would serve Axtis very well to put her and Kai upon one of those golden barges. To let the Danoob carry his problems away, to discharge his responsibilities to the river, and if the barge should sink with all hands, a small price to pay to keep Congression beyond the Dead King’s reach for another four years.

  The carriage rolled on amidst the guard column, past woods and fields, town and cottage. Chella found herself watching the scenery, enjoying the warmth of rare sunshine between the rains, breathing in the scents of the countryside, the stink of farms. When the cry of ‘Honth’ shook her from her thoughts she bit her tongue to let the pain sharpen her. Life casts more spells than any necromancer and they can be twice as deadly in their softness.

  ‘How far?’ she called out to the driver.

  ‘A mile, two maybe.’

 
They creaked on for a few more minutes before rolling to a halt.

  ‘We can’t be there yet.’ Kai opened the door. Hedgerows, cattle lowing beyond. A surge of horse and gold-armoured bodies, and Axtis dismounted before them.

  ‘Lady Chella, another delegate—’

  ‘Get out of the way.’ A louder voice overriding the captain’s. ‘You can’t stop me – I’m on a peace mission.’

  Axtis slammed the carriage door in Kai’s face.

  ‘You have no authority here, sir!’ Axtis used the shout he reserved for his men. ‘I suggest you return to the forward column.’

  The sound of someone jumping from their horse. ‘I’m on a diplomatic visit, Captain. Your job is to facilitate such intercourse. If we delegates come to blows you may intervene.’

  The carriage door rattled, a hand on the handle. Kai blocked the grille, staring down at the scene outside.

  ‘This has to be the representatives from the Drowned Isles, no? Who else would be following from the west?’ A loud sniff. ‘Doesn’t smell like the Dead King – who’ve you got in here, Captain?’

  Kai opened the door. And backed away, half-pushed, half of his own accord, as Jorg Ancrath, clad in the blacks and reds of a road tunic, clambered in.

  ‘Chella!’ The boy turned one of his dangerous smiles on her, ignoring Kai.

  ‘Jorg.’

  He sat on the bench opposite them, legs stretched out, boots muddy on the floor, at perfect ease. He flicked the long black tangles of his hair back across his shoulders, watching her with dark eyes, amusement touching the sharp angles of his face, the ugly burn a reminder of his extremes.

  ‘Two of you?’ Again that sharp grin. ‘Is that all the living that can be mustered from the Drowned Isles? And Chella, you’re no Brettan. I would have heard it in your voice.’

  ‘The Jorg?’ Kai turned her way.

  ‘A Jorg, certainly.’ Jorg leaned in, elbows on his knees. Outside, the guard clustered. ‘And it does seem I’m the object of unhealthy fascination in certain quarters. Isn’t that so, Chella?’ He let his hand fall to rest on the black skirts over her thigh. ‘I am of course married now, dear heart, so you must put romance from your mind.’