King of Thorns be-2 Read online

  Fexler blinked at me. Perhaps he had often blinked so and the machine remembered. “It has many purposes, young man, simple ones that you might understand-the pumping and purification of water-and others that are beyond you. It is a hub, part of a network without end, a tool for observation and communication, bunkered away for security. For me and my kind it serves as one of many windows onto the small world of flesh.”

  “Small?” I smiled. He lived in a metal box not much bigger than a coffin.

  Fexler frowned, peevish. “I have other things to do: go and play elsewhere.”

  “Tell me this,” I said. “My world. It’s not like the one I read about in the oldest books. When they talk about magic, about ghosts, it’s as if they are fairy-tales to frighten children. And yet I have seen the dead walk, seen a boy bring fire with just a thought.”

  Fexler frowned as if considering how to explain. “Think of reality as a ship whose course is set, whose wheel is locked in place by universal constants.”

  I wondered if a drink would help with such imaginings. All that wine seemed very tempting.

  “Our greatest achievement, and downfall, was to turn that wheel, just a fraction. The role of the observer was always important-we discovered that. If a tree falls in the wood and no one hears it, it both does and doesn’t make a sound. If no one sees it, then it is both standing and not standing. The cat is both alive and dead.”

  “Who mentioned a fecking cat?”

  The ghost of Fexler Brews sighed. “We weakened the barriers between thought and matter-”

  “I’ve heard this before,” I said. Ferrakind had told me something similar. Could this ghost of a Builder share that same madness? The Nuban had spoken of barriers thinning, of the veil between life and death wearing through. “The Builders made magic? Brought it into the world with their machines?”

  “There is no magic.” Fexler shook his head. “We changed the constants. Just a little. Strengthened the link between want and what is. Now not only is the tree both fallen and unfallen-if the right man wills it so, with sufficient focus, the fallen tree will stand. The zombie cat will walk and purr.”

  “What’s a zombie?”

  Another sigh. Fexler vanished and all the lights went out. Even my lantern.

  I climbed back up the stairs in the dark, got bitten by a spider, and was very late with Lady Agath’s wine.

  43

  Four years earlier

  I came to the Castle Morrow refectory with a swollen hand and a sore head. Spider venom makes your insides crawl and puts illusions at the edge of your vision, illusions as nasty as you can imagine. And I’ve been cursed with a good imagination.

  The house guards and the wall guards tend to agree on very little, but they all agreed I was a dumb northerner and that I probably wouldn’t swing a sword quite so fancy for a while.

  It being Sunday, the cook prepared a special treat for us. Snails in garlic and wine, with saffron rice. The snails came from the local cliffs. A big variety as thick as a child’s arm. But let’s face it, snails are just slugs with a hat on. The main dish looked like large lumps of snot in blood. Why the Horse Coast is obsessed with eating things that squish I’m not sure. Already feeling queasy, I tried the rice. Apparently Earl Hansa had bestowed a great honour upon us, saffron being the spice of kings and trading at silly prices. All I can say is that it tasted of bitter honey to me and turned my stomach. I took the smallest nibble and decided to go hungry.

  I slunk off to bed with a heel of bread and fell into vivid dreams.

  The fact that I was caught sleeping, or rather that I was caught whilst sleeping, I put down to the spider bite and the truth that if you jumped up swinging at every passer-by in a guards’ dormitory you would soon kill off half the castle.

  I woke with strong hands clasped around my wrists and ankles, and discovered that no amount of struggling was going to stop them dragging me through several corridors, down a flight of stairs, and into a dungeon cell. They had a healthy respect for my ability to do them harm, so in order to retreat in safety, one of them hit me in the stomach as hard as he could whilst the others stretched me wide for the blow. I heard them running out, and the slam of the door boomed over my retching.

  Shouting to be let out always seemed rather silly to me. It’s not as if you’re going to help the people who put you there to realize that they hadn’t meant to do it after all. So I didn’t shout. I sat on the floor and wondered. Perhaps Qalasadi had told his secret and my family weren’t amused. Or more likely my excursion to the Builder machine below the wine-cellar had been discovered and judged poorly.

  It took an hour. A face appeared at the small window in the cell door. A foolish move in my opinion, since if I had been so minded I could have done serious harm to that face with the knife they had left on me.

  “Hello, Lord Jost,” I said. I’d met him only for moments before he passed me on to Captain Ortens for the house guard, but he had a pinched face and small dark moustache that was easy to remember.

  “William of Ancrath,” he said. He spoke the words slowly as if having trouble giving them credit.

  The floor was uncomfortable and quite cold. I felt I might get out of there more quickly if I let him have his say. So I said nothing.

  “What poison did you use, William?” he asked.

  I looked at my hand in the half-light. The spider bite had turned purple. “Poison?” I asked.

  “I’m not here for games, boy. I’ll leave you to rot. If they die before you’re ready to talk, then the Earl will hire in Moorish torturers to make an example of you.”

  The face drew back.

  “Wait!” I got to my feet sharpish. I didn’t like the sound of Moorish torturers. In fact it’s hard to put any word in front of “torturers” that doesn’t sound unsettling. “Tell me what happened and you’ll have the whole truth from me. I swear by Jesu.”

  He turned and walked away.

  I threw myself to the door, face at the window. “I can save them,” I lied. “But I have to know who was affected.”

  Lord Jost turned and I thanked whoever it was that invented lying. “Every guard on the day shift is falling into delirium,” he said. “Several have gone blind.”

  “And I’m the only one not showing symptoms, so that makes me guilty?”

  “You’re some kind of assassin, clearly. Probably Olidan of Ancrath’s man. If you provide an antidote I can promise you a quick death.”

  “I don’t have an antidote,” I said. Who would want to poison a whole shift of guards?

  “What poison did you use? You promised the truth,” Lord Jost said.

  “If I’m an assassin why would you expect me to keep my promise? And if I’m not, then I can’t, can I? Because I didn’t do it.”

  Lord Jost spat in an unlordly fashion and started to walk off again.

  “Wait. It’s got to be Moors, hasn’t it? Why would King Olidan want to poison a few guards? He not going to march an army a thousand miles to knock at your door. The Moors are planning a raid.”

  He turned the corner.

  “I’m not sick because I didn’t eat the meal!” I shouted after him.

  The echoes of his footsteps faded away.

  “Because all your food tastes like shit that somebody set fire to!” I shouted.

  And I was alone.

  The dead baby came to me in the dark, solemn eyes watching, head lolling on a broken neck. For the millionth time I wondered if I had killed Katherine back there in that graveyard. Was this my child, that could never be because I’d murdered his mother, or just one of the many children whose blood stained my hands? Gelleth’s children. It had taken a monster to make them real to me. Not a monster in shape. I’d called Gog and Gorgoth monsters. But Chella and I were the real item, foul in deed if not form.

  Why poison the guards? It could be the Moors, but they could hardly take the castle in a single raid, and they couldn’t poison all her defenders. And it’s not wise to give such warning if y
ou’re hoping for a fast strike on outlying towns and churches.

  An iron fist clenched around my stomach, taking me by surprise, and I hurled watery vomit across the cell. I fell forward onto my hands.

  “Shit.”

  The darkness kept spinning on me, so I pressed my cheek to the cold stone floor. My scar still burned, as if the splinters lodged in my flesh were kept hot.

  Maybe I had been poisoned after all. But why would it take longer with me? Not my hardy northern constitution, surely? And I ate almost nothing. A piece of bread. A mouthful of bitter rice.

  I had to get out. And that’s the trouble with dungeon cells. Somebody took trouble to make sure you’re not going anywhere, and no amount of wanting will change that.

  I stood and went to the door. With Lord Jost and his lantern gone there was almost no light, but something filtered down, perhaps a whisper of the sun dazzling in the courtyards above if day had swung around, perhaps an echo of torchlight farther down the corridors they’d dragged me along. In any event it proved enough for night-tutored eyes to find edges and the occasional detail. I examined the little window in the door. I could fit an arm through it if it weren’t for the bars. The wood was three fingers thick, hardwood. It would take a week of whittling with my dagger to make much of a hole.

  Something scurried behind me. A rat. I can tell rat noises in the dark. I threw my dagger. It used to be a game amongst the Brothers. Nail a rat in the dark. Grumlow proved a master of that particular game. We would often wake to find a rat skewered to the sod by one of his blades. Sometimes uncomfortably close to my head.

  “Got you.”

  Being as there was no morning to wait for, I hunted my victim down by hand and retrieved my knife.

  I went back to the window and its bars. I pushed against them, trying to imagine how they would be fixed to the wood. There was no give in them. It’s funny how often our lives shrink down to a single obdurate piece of metal. A knife edge, a manacle, a nail. Gorgoth might have reached out and twisted those bars off in that blunt hand of his. Not me. I pulled and pushed until my hand bled. Nothing.

  I sat back down. I thought, thought, and then thought some more. In the end I went to the window and started hollering for them to let me out.

  It took a while. Long enough for my throat to grow raw and my voice to crack, but in the end a glow approached. The swinging glow of a lantern.

  “You get one chance to shut your mouth, boy. After that-”

  “You’re going to shut it for me?” I asked, pressed close to the door.

  “Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? For me to open the door. I heard about you and Master Shimon. I wouldn’t open that door for a gold coin. No. You shut your mouth or you’ll discover you’ve taken your last drink of water on God’s earth.”

  “Hey, don’t be like that. I’m sorry.” I reached up and dropped my watch so that it fell into the basket made by the window cage. “Look, take this, it’s worth a hundred coins. Just bring me something good to eat would you?”

  I crouched low. Listening. Listening.

  The gaoler stepped in to take the bait and bang, I slid my arm out through the feeding slot at the base of the door, skinning my elbow, and caught him behind his ankle. A sharp yank and he fell. I took a firmer grip hauling his foot toward the slot, but he didn’t struggle.

  “Damn.”

  The bastard had hit his head and knocked himself senseless. I’d been planning to reduce the number of his toes with my knife until he offered me his key. It’s hard to intimidate an unconscious man.

  I picked up my dead rat. Still warm.

  There are quite a few uses for a dead rat. I’ll go into them at another time. The use I had in mind proved difficult. It turned out to be harder to make a dead rat scurry again than it did to set Brother Row diving in the mud. It’s hard to understand a rat, to wear its skin. I almost gave up but when I focused on hunger, it twitched in my hands. It turns out that being dead doesn’t stop a rat thinking about its next meal. Before too long I had the creature marching to my tune, and I pushed it out through the food slot.

  In the light of the gaoler’s lantern, which helpfully he had hung on a hook before reaching for my watch, I sent the rat out searching.

  I sat in the small blob of rat brain telling it to gnaw on the thong holding the ring of keys to the gaoler’s belt. When the key ring came loose I had the rat drag it to me. In a truly secure cell you wouldn’t be able to unlock from the inside, but all systems have their flaws. I let the rat die again and stepped out into the corridor, a free man after my long hours of incarceration!

  My stomach clenched but it didn’t feel as if I was dying; a touch lightheaded, a touch unclean, but necromancy will do some of that for you in any case. If I had been poisoned then whoever did it had done a bad job.

  I gagged the gaoler with strips of cloth and locked him in my cell. Glancing into the other cells along the corridor it appeared that my grandfather was not the locking-up sort. That meant he was either very keen on executions or that he ruled with a light touch.

  Slow steps took me to the gaoler’s desk where the ceiling port let the moonlight in. It was late but perhaps not midnight. I had had some time to think and I kept thinking. If I were going to poison my enemies I wouldn’t waste my efforts on thirty guardsmen, I’d try to empty the throne and throw the whole place into confusion. But any kind of poisoning is hard to do. Castle kitchens are well watched, the cooks as trusted as the men who shave the royal throat. Fresh provisions are hard to taint, potatoes, carrots, and the like. Dry provisions are bought incognito and escorted to locked pantries.

  I left the dungeons. I still wore the household uniform and the single guard at the exit had been obliging enough to let me knock his head against the wall. Unfortunately a burned face is hard to hide. You can’t present your good side to the whole world. I found a window and took to the rooftops.

  Sitting against the main chimney stack, legs stretched out across the terracotta tiles of the great hall’s roof, I pondered.

  Not the slugs-sorry, snails. I didn’t partake. So the rice. But poisoning rice? The water and boiling and draining would soak it all away. So the saffron. But that would be purchased from whatever ship next turned up at harbour with stocks on board. How often does a household run out of a spice that costs more per ounce than gold? How many ships carry it? What households other than those of the Hundred would buy such luxury in any case? Bundle all those factors together…what would the odds be…what probabilities would emerge? Just thinking about the necessary calculations made my head hurt.

  Qalasadi!

  I slid down the slope of the roof, hoping no tiles would come with me. I reached the wide stone gutter and edged across it, looking for a place where it was well supported. Ending my reign as king in a gory splat at the bottom of a seventy-foot drop was no part of my ambitions. I could hear muffled voices from several quarters, the sigh of the ocean, waves lapping the foot of the cliffs, and the relentless buzz and chirp of the night insects that haunt the Horse Coast.

  Castle Morrow bakes in the southern sun much of the year. The winters can be ferocious but are rarely cold. There may well be old men in the region who have never seen snow. In consequence the windows are large and unscreened, the storm-shutters heavy and locked open from early spring to late autumn. With a firm grip on the gutter’s edge and my left ankle locked under the bottom row of tiles, I hung upside-down and looked through a high window into the great hall.

  The far end of the single long table had been set with silver and crystal. Wall lamps burning smokeless oil gave a welcoming glow. A servant brought in three decanters of wine, two white, one red. Elite house guards in plumed finery stood watch at six points around the hall.

  The servant left. Minutes passed. The blood ran to my head, my eyeballs began to prickle and itch, my fingers grew numb where they gripped the stonework. I heard noise down in the courtyard below. A quick commotion. I decided not to move. Silence returned.
r />   At last the black oak doors opened and two servants stepped through to hold them wide as my uncle walked in, escorting Lady Agath. They took their seats, maids now attending to pull the chairs out and settle the nobility. Two more ladies followed in. Old biddies I recognized from the Ladies’ Hall. A young man with a fat gut strode in, wrapped in blue velvet despite the heat. My grandmother, who I saw once at the Tall Castle, came escorted and supported by a pageboy. She looked unsteady, her hair very white, her skin pale, thin, drawn. Then my grandfather, taking his high-backed chair at the head of the table. Earl Hansa surprised me; he looked only a little older than my father, a solidly built man with a short grey beard and long thick hair still streaked with black.

  More servants now, bearing covered silver platters.

  A drop of sweat left my nose and fell away into the darkness. My head felt fuzzy and full of blood.

  The covers came away in a choreographed move, flourished overhead by the servants, and revealing today’s delicacies. No snails. No rice.

  I slid with less grace than I had hoped and swung clumsily into the window, sitting on the ledge and steadying myself with both hands. I very nearly ended up in the unplanned splat. Hanging upside-down before attempting acrobatics is not to be recommended.

  I had hoped to go unnoticed a while longer but perhaps Lady Agath was the only person in the great hall not to look up.

  To his credit, while the fat boy jumped to his feet, and several of the ladies shrieked, Lord Robert called for the house guard to shield the Earl. The Earl Hansa himself took a sip from his wine then called out, “I had a grandson named William Ancrath.”

  “And I had a brother of that name,” I called back.

  My uncle stood up at that.

  I released the edges of the window. With a quick motion I threw my dagger. It struck the centremost platter and yellowed slices of potato sprinkled with sea-salt and crushed black peppercorns leapt across the table. The spider bite had left my finger joints sore and swollen and the knife went far closer to one of the old women’s ears than I had intended.