King of Thorns Read online

  “Be still, boy, you’re never still,” Lady Agath said.

  I hadn’t moved a muscle for five minutes. I continued the habit and held my tongue.

  “Don’t be smart with me,” she said. “Your eyes are always flitting from one thing to the next. Never still. And you think too much. I can see you thinking right now.”

  “My apologies, Lady Agath,” I said.

  She harrumphed, jowls quivering, and settled back in her black lace. “Play on,” she told the minstrel, a dark and handsome fellow in his twenties who had a sufficient combination of looks and talent to hold the attention of Agath and three other old noblewomen at one end of the Ladies’ Hall.

  The Ladies’ Hall appeared to be where Horse Coast women came to die. For certain there weren’t any ladies there on the right side of sixty.

  “You’re doing it again,” Lady Agath hissed.

  “My apologies.”

  “Go to the wine-cellar and tell them I want a jug of wine, Wennith red, something from the south slopes,” Lady Agath told me.

  “I’m not supposed to leave you unattended, Lady Agath,” I said.

  “I’m not unattended, I have Rialto here.” She waved toward the minstrel. “I always have my wine from the cellar. I don’t know what they do to it in that kitchen but they ruin it. Leave it open to the air I guess. And the girls always dawdle so,” she remarked to the other ladies. “Go, boy, quick about it.”

  I had my doubts as to whether Rialto could protect Lady Agath from an angry wasp, let alone any other threats, but I didn’t feel her to be in any danger, and I didn’t much care if she was, so I left without complaint.

  It took me a while to find my way down to the right cellar, but after a few wrong turns I located the place. You can generally tell a wine-cellar by the sturdiness of the door, second only to the treasury door in the majority of castles. Even the most loyal servants will steal your wine given a quarter of a chance, and they’ll piss the evidence over the wall.

  I had another trip to find the day cook and get him to unlock for me. He sat on a chair positioned by the door and set to chewing on the leg of mutton he’d carried down with him in his apron.

  “Jugs are by the door. Go find what you want. Don’t leave the spigot dripping. Wennith reds are at the far end, left corner, marked with a double cross and crown.”

  I lit a lantern from his and ventured in.

  “Watch out for spiders,” he said. “The smaller brown ones are bad. Don’t get bit.” When he said “small” he made a circle with his finger and thumb that didn’t look particularly small.

  The cellar stretched on for dozens of yards, the wine casks stacked on shelves, most unbroached, the occasional one set with a spigot. I wound a path along the narrow alleys, squeezing past a loading truck and several empty casks left to trip me.

  The Wennith red caskets were all sealed save for an empty one. I suspected most of its contents had swilled through the Lady Agath on their way to the privy. The tools and spare spigots for broaching a new cask weren’t apparent. I noted a door, almost concealed beneath a build-up of grime and mould, behind a stack of emptied barrels. It looked too disused to be a store cupboard, but the need of a mallet and spigot provided a good excuse to have a look behind. I’m an explorer at heart and I’d come to nose around in any case. What noble folk keep in their cellars and dungeons can tell you a lot about them. My father kept most of my road-brothers for torture and execution in his dungeon. I won’t say that they didn’t deserve it. Harsh but fair, that’s what my father’s dungeon said about him. Mostly harsh.

  I had to lift and heave at the same time to get the door to judder across the flagstones, pushing the empties aside. When a gap had opened large enough to admit me, I went in. A spiral staircase led down. The stairs themselves were carved stone, the work of the castle masons, but the shaft down which they led was poured, Builder-stone. The shaft led down fifty feet or so, into the bedrock. At the bottom an archway led into a rectangular chamber dominated by a grimy machine of cylinders, bolts, and circular plates. Glow-bulbs provided a weak light, three of maybe twenty still working, though not as bright as those in the Tall Castle.

  I crossed to the machine and ran a hand along one of its many pipes. My fingers came away black, leaving gleaming streaks of exposed silver metal. The whole machine shook with a faint vibration, little more than heavy footfalls echoing in a stone floor.

  “Go away.” An old man stood there, sketched rapidly by an invisible hand. The ghost of an old man I should say, because only light fashioned him. I could see the machine through his body, and he had no colour to his flesh, as if he were made from fog. He wore white clothes, close fitting, of a strange cut, and from one moment to the next his whole form would flicker as if a moth had passed before whatever light was projected to create him.

  “Make me,” I said.

  “Ha! That’s a good one.” He grinned. In looks he could have been brother to Sword-master Shimon. “Most folk just run screaming when I say ‘boo.’”

  “I’ve seen my share of ghosts, old man,” I said.

  “Of course you have, boy,” he said. He looked as though he were humouring me. Which was odd given that he was a ghost himself.

  “How long have you haunted this place, and what manner of machine is this?” I asked. It pays to be to the point with ghosts and spirits. They tend to vanish before you know it.

  “I’m not a ghost. I’m a data echo. The man I am copied from lived another fourteen years after I was captured—”

  “How long?”

  “—and died more than a thousand years ago,” he said.

  “You’re the ghost of a Builder?” I asked. It seemed far-fetched. Even ghosts don’t last that long.

  “I am an algorithm. I am portrayed in the image of Fexler Brews, my responses are extrapolated from the six terats of data gathered on the man during the course of his life. I echo him.”

  I understood some of the words. “What data? Numbers? Like Qalasadi keeps in his books of trade?”

  “Numbers, letters, books, pictures, unguarded moments captured in secret, phrases muttered in his sleep, exclamations cried out in coitus, chemical analysis of his waste, public presentations, private meditations, polygraphic evidence, DNA samples. Data.”

  “What can you do for me, ghost?” His gibberish meant little to me. It seemed that they had watched him and written his story into a machine—and now that story spoke to me even though the man himself was dust on the wind.

  Fexler Brews shrugged. “I’m an old man out of my time. Not even that. An incomplete copy of an old man out of his time.”

  “You can tell me secrets. Give me the power of the ancients,” I said. I didn’t think he would, or my grandfather would already be emperor, but it didn’t hurt to try.

  “You wouldn’t understand my secrets. There’s a gap between what I say and what you can comprehend. You people could fill that gap in fifty years if you stopped trying to kill each other and started to look at what’s lying around you.”

  “Try me.” I didn’t like his tone. At the end of it this thing before me was nothing but a shadow-play, a story being told by a machine of cogs and springs and magic all bound by the secret fire of the Builders. “What does this do?” I tapped the machinery with my foot. “What is it for?”

  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 t
hey 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 you’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’r
e 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.