Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3) (15 page)

I thought again of falling leaves and wondered if it wasn’t time for another old man, full to the brim with poison, to make that final drop.

Five years of marching back and forth. Five years scurrying to do the Dead King’s bidding. Always on the edge of things, as far from his court as one could be and still remain in the empire. Chella spent five years wading through mud and shit simply to rise enough in the Dead King’s esteem for him to call her to court and seek an accounting for her failure. And she had come eagerly, racing across the broken empire just to face his judgment, just to stand before the inhumanity of the lichkin and have the Dead King watch her from the flesh into which he had settled deepest. Five wasted years – each one Jorg Ancrath’s fault.

‘There’s a reason I’m having to hurt you.’

Chella walked around the stone pillar, a slow circle, hiding her irritation. The young man followed her with his eyes until the pillar took her from sight. She heard the clank of chains as he craned his head to look for her return. He had blue eyes, like many of these Brettan men, and he watched
her
as much as he watched the iron needle between her finger and thumb.

‘Where’s Sula?’ He asked his question again. In the few patches without mud his hair showed blond, a golden hue. He met her gaze through locks matted with dirt and blood. Mire-ghouls had taken him and a woman near the Reed Sea during the Dead King’s advance. Sigils on his uniform had marked him as wind-sworn and led him to this inspection.

‘Kai.’ Chella kept her voice tender, moving in quick and close, driving the needle two inches into the muscle of his inner thigh. ‘Kai Summerson.’ Her lips close enough to his ear for the blond hair to tickle. ‘You have to let go of these attachments.’

He ground his teeth together, tension bunching around his jaw. After a moment he looked up again. ‘Where—’

Chella pulled the needle free. ‘Pain helps remind you of what is important. The first important fact is that I don’t have much time to waste on you and if you don’t cooperate quickly I will just give you back to the ghouls and let them eat you piece by piece. The second important fact is that you’re alive and that pain is not the only thing you can feel. I’m offering you a rare chance. Power, pleasure, a future.’

‘Where is S—’

Chella slapped him across the face, hard enough to hurt her hand. ‘Here.’ She didn’t need to speak. She just pulled the thread that bound her to each of her returned. Sula stepped from the shadow into Kai’s line of sight. The ghouls hadn’t left her pretty. Flesh and skin hung in a wet flap revealing her cheekbone, jaw, broken teeth, and the dark stump of her tongue. The dead girl watched Kai without curiosity. He sucked in a breath, gasping a deeper hurt than the needle had yet put in him. Perhaps she’d been his sweetheart. Surely more than a passing fancy.

‘Sula?’ Tears misted his eyes.

‘Oh, grow up.’ Boredom and anxiety nipped at Chella’s heels and neither would help her turn him. ‘She’s dead. You’re not. You can accept her death and find yourself a new direction, or you can join her. The world is changing. Are you going to change with it, Kai?’

Chella flicked her fingers at Sula and the corpse collapsed, ungainly, air belching as her stomach folded.

‘Is she still “your girl”, Kai? Does true love survive where flesh corrupts? What was she to you? A pretty face, a quick panting release? There’s no romance in death, Kai, and death’s the flip side of our coin.’ She ran her fingers up into that blond hair of his. ‘We’re just meat on bones, waiting to rot. Find your pleasure where you will, by all means, but don’t dress it up in sweetness and promises. There’s nothing left to pin your loyalty on any more, Kai. Give it up.’

She took his wrist below the manacle and drove the needle through his palm, past clenched fingers. He cried out then, half a curse, half a scream, starting to break. Soon it would be all scream.

‘W-what do you want?’ He gasped his words past clenched teeth.

‘Me? I want what you should want,’ Chella said. ‘I want what the Dead King wants me to want. The Dead King doesn’t need your loyalty, he just requires that you do what he tells you to do. And when he has nothing for us to do, our time is our own.’

Chella pulled the needle free and licked the blood off it. She slid her other hand down across Kai’s ribs and the hard muscle of his stomach, sweat slick.

‘What do you want me for?’ he asked.

Not stupid this one. And a survivor – at his core a survivor ready to do whatever is needed. Lead him slowly though, step by step.

Chella ran her hand lower. Even survivors balk if shown too much of the path at once. There’s a road to hell that is paved with good intentions but it’s a long route. The quicker path is paved with the kind of ignorance that clever men who just don’t want to know are best at.

‘You have talents that are rare, Kai.’

‘The Dead King wants to recruit sky-sworn now?’

‘Sky-sworn, rock-sworn, flame-sworn, sea-sworn.’ Chella pricked his ribs with each word. ‘They are all sworn, and men who can swear once can swear again. We’re the same, you and I, we reach through into other places. What do you think the necromancers are, Kai? Monsters? Dead things?’

‘You’re dead. Everyone knows necromancers rise from the grave.’

Chella leaned in close, close enough that he could bite her neck if he chose, her lips at his ear once more. ‘Death-sworn.’

In five years the Dead King had risen from being simply a new complication in the art of necromancy to a force that would change the world. He no longer bartered with necromancers, no longer manipulated, steered or simply terrified them into carrying out his will. He owned them. He no longer watched from the Dry Lands, peering into life through dead eyes where they fell, speaking with corpse lips, he inhabited the living world in stolen bodies, walking where he pleased. An army had grown about him. The lichkin had sprung from some untapped well of horror, lieutenants for the hordes of his dead.

While Chella had languished, the Dead King had risen beyond measure. His summons to court could mark a grisly end to the dark little tale of her existence, or a new beginning. She would present herself with Kai as her offering. Fresh meat. Even in the Dead King’s forces necromancers were not common. Bearing gifts she would answer his call and answer for her failings with the Ancrath boy – who had also risen beyond measure and expectation.

Five years earlier

Carrod Springs stinks. Not a human stink of waste and rot but a chemical offence against the senses, the bad-egg stench of sulphur, combined with sharper aromas fit for turning eyes red and stripping the lining from your nose.

‘You see now why the trail detours so far to approach from the west with the prevailing wind,’ Lesha said.

‘Why would anyone live here?’ Sunny asked.

A fair question. True enough, water had become a rarity as we trekked north into the wasteland, but the stuff that bubbled up in Carrod Springs could surely not be potable. It had risen hot and steaming from the earth’s bowels. And smelled like it.

The settlement, seven shacks and two storage barns, clustered on a rise to the west, a spot where the breeze would offer a clean lungful. If there ever was any breeze. The buildings looked frost-rimed but drawing closer you could see it for what it was: salt, caked to the wood, bearding the eaves. We passed the first barn, doors wide, mounds of salt on display, like grain heaped from the harvest, some piles white, some grey, at the back rusty orange, and to the left-side smaller heaps of a deep but faint blue.

Balky had to be encouraged with a stick. None of the animals wanted to be here. They licked their muzzles, spat, and licked again. I could taste it on my lips too, like the salt spray off the ocean but sharper and more penetrating. My hands felt dry as if the skin on them had died and gone to parchment.

We tied the horses and Lesha led us to one of the smallest shacks – I had taken it to be a privy. A handful of residents watched us from their doorways, all of them veiled, salt crusted on the cloth where they drew breath. One had a huge goitre that wrapped his neck in throttling folds of mottled flesh. At the shack, Lesha knocked and entered. Sunny and I stood by the doorway peering into the gloom. It seemed unlikely we would all fit inside.

‘Lesha.’ A figure, seated in the far corner, nodding to her.

‘Toltech.’ She crouched before him.

Toltech watched her with bright eyes over the top of his veil. He worked the mortar and pestle in his hands all the while, grinding away.

‘You’re going back in?’ He didn’t sound surprised.

‘Three of us, with three beasts. We’ll need pills for a week.’

‘A week is a long time in the Iberico.’ Toltech glanced to me then to Sunny. ‘An hour can be a long time there.’

‘If it takes us an hour, we’ll be there an hour,’ Lesha said.

Toltech put down his pestle and reached across to a low shelf. He picked up a bowl filled with small wraps of greased paper, tightly bound. Scars ran along his hand. The same molten scars that covered Lesha.

‘Take one at sunrise, one at sunset. Swallow them in the paper if you can. The salt steals any moisture in the air and dissolves in it, so these will not last long anywhere damp. Take a hundred. Five silver.’

The right salts helped keep out the sickness caused by the echoes of the Builders’ fire. Nobody knew why. The required salts could be separated from the waters of Carrod Springs with sufficient expertise. Five pieces of silver seemed a small price to pay. I counted out the coins, one stamped with my grandfather’s head, and passed them in to Lesha.

Toltech started to count salt pills into a cotton bag. ‘If you find anything in the hills, even if it’s just broken pieces, bring it to me. I might give you your silver back.’

‘What have you had from the Iberico before, Master Toltech?’ I asked. ‘I’m something of a collector myself.’ I leaned a little way in through the entrance. Beneath the salts’ astringency the smell of sickness caught at me.

‘Small things.’ He pointed at two short bottles of green glass on the shelf where the bowl had rested. Beside them a tray covered with pieces of fractured plasteek in many colours and shapes. From behind him he took a great cog of silvery metal, stained with age. It looked like an enormous cousin to one of the minute pieces from inside the watch in my baggage. ‘Nothing of great consequence. The best I sell on.’

‘And do you know about the Builders, Master Toltech? Do you learn their secrets as you sift through their leavings?’ I asked.

‘I know only what all of us here know about the Builders. What our fathers knew.’

‘And that is?’ Some men like to be prompted.

‘That they are not gone, and that you cannot trust them.’

We camped that night on the very edge of the Iberico range where a poisoned stream named the Cuyahoga ran out across the badlands. I swallowed my salt pill, the bitterness escaping despite its wrap of paper. Toltech had had no more to say about the Builders so as we settled down after sunset I quizzed Lesha.

‘What does your friend mean when he says the Builders are not gone?’

I felt rather than saw her shrug. We lay close, despite the weight of heat upon us. ‘Some say the Builders are spirits now, all around us, written into the elements.’

‘Not just echoes in machines?’ I thought of Fexler flickering into life as I came down the cellar steps.

Lesha lifted to face me, frowning, deep enough that her scars buckled into furrows. ‘Machines? Things of wheels and pulleys? I don’t understand.’

‘Spirits you say?’ I decided to keep the engines beneath my grandfather’s castle to myself. ‘Good spirits or evil ones?’

Again the shrug. ‘Just spirits. In the air, in rocks, running through rivers and streams, even staring at you out of the fire.’

‘I heard that the Builders took hold of what is real, and before they scorched the world, they changed it,’ I said.

‘Changed what?’ I’d forgotten Sunny was even there.

‘Everything. Me, you, the world, what
real
is. They made the world listen a little more to what’s in men’s heads. They made thoughts and fears matter, made them able to change what’s around us.’

‘They didn’t make it listen to me.’

I smiled at Sunny’s grumbling.

‘Earl Hansa had a rock-sworn mage work for him,’ Sunny added. ‘A young fellow. Must have been ten, fifteen years ago. Arron. That was it. He could work stone with his hands as if it was butter. One time he set a finger to my sword and it got so heavy I couldn’t hold it. I couldn’t pry it off the floor until the next day.’

‘What happened to him?’ He sounded like a useful man to know, this Arron.

‘Sunk.’

‘Ah.’

‘Not at sea though. Ortens says he saw it, and Ortens isn’t one for lying. He just sunk into the floor one morning. Right out in the centre courtyard. And nobody saw him again. There’s just a grey stain where he went into the rock.’

‘Well there’s a thing,’ I said.

And we all fell silent.

I lay for a time, on my blanket on the dust, listening to the silence. Something was wrong. I groped for it, reaching like you do in the night when your knife isn’t where it should be. For the longest time I couldn’t discover what it was that irked me.

‘There’s no noise.’ I sat up.

‘What?’ Lesha, sleep edging her voice.

‘Those things, those damned cicadas that screech all night. Where are they?’

‘Not here,’ she said. ‘We’re too close. Nothing lives in the Iberico. Not rats, not bugs, not lichen on rocks. If you want to go back – now is the time.’

Five years earlier

The silence made it hard to sleep. The quiet seemed to have infected us all, even the horses held their peace, barely a snort or scrape of hoof hour after hour. In place of the night’s muttering my ears invented their own script for the darkness. I heard whispers from the copper box, a taunting voice just beyond hearing, and behind even that, the sound of my own screaming. Perhaps the death of all those cicadas saved me, burned away by the ghost of the Builders’ fire, or maybe built as I am of suspicion and mistrust I would have heard the attackers coming wherever we slept. Somewhere a stone grated beneath the sole of a shoe.