Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3) (26 page)

‘Why?’ Rike repeated.

‘Because it doesn’t want us to,’ I said, pressing on.

I made a mental note to change my ways. If, every time an enemy demands you sit down, instead you jump up, well that predictability becomes a ring through your nose by which you can be pulled when pushing fails.

‘Enjoy yourselves.’ Rike sounded further behind me.

I stopped and turned. Rike had never really taken to the business of me being king. I might have seven nations where men bent their knee to me in their thousands, through love or fear, mainly fear, but with Rike the only knee-bending took place when not to do so would get that knee broken.

‘Do we have to do this now, Brother Rike?’ I asked.

He sneered. ‘What are you gonna do? Cut my skin off and scoop out my eyes?’

Apparently the lichkin scared him more than I did.

‘Of course not.’ I shook my head, showing him the old smile. ‘I’m a king!’ I took a stride toward him. Lowering Gog’s point to the water so it sizzled, jumped, and spat, the steam rising between us. ‘I’ll have a professional do it. Somebody who really enjoys it. Kings don’t dirty their hands.’

Gorgoth let out a deep laugh at that. Makin joined him. In the end even Rike gave that ‘hur’ of his and we carried on. Jokes come hard when you’re past ball-deep in icy water and heading toward hell, but fortunately my audience wasn’t too discerning. Also I wasn’t joking.

Closer to the copse now, water around my waist, each step sinking into hidden softness. Three times I caught myself from falling, tripped by some submerged briar or fencepost. Makin went down once and came up cursing and spluttering.

The water seemed colder closer to the trees, plates of wafer-thin ice gliding in our wake, and a mist rising, tendrils reaching to mix with the frosting of our breath. The mists rose with us as the gradient led us from the flood among the outermost of the black and dripping trees.

I saw the first ghost only as a glimpse between trunks, a figure moving fast but not stirring the calf-deep water. Just a glimpse, ragged black hair, muddy, a child. The name Orscar floated through me, though I couldn’t place it. I turned to warn the brothers, sword still levelled at where the boy had been. And of course found only mist to meet me. Mist and an iron cross, a pendant hanging from a low branch, a blob of red enamel at the crossing point. For the blood of Christ.

‘I know this game of shades, dead-thing!’ I swung Gog in a slow circle, mists shrivelling back before the flames. ‘Bring my dead mother, William, the baby if you must. Bring the dead of Gelleth, bring Greyson’s ghost with his eyes gone, bring Lesha carrying her head. You’re playing the wrong hand against me. I’ve known worse.’

‘Have you now?’

A sharp pain took me in the chest. I turned again and the fire on Gog died, blade dropping as the strength left my arm.

Father stood, wolf-robed, iron crowned, iron in his hair, winter in his eyes.

‘You’re not dead.’ The words left me, soft and without emotion. ‘Not a ghost.’

‘Am I not?’

‘You’re not!’ Beneath my breastplate blood spilled, pumped from an old wound, soaking my shirt and the woollens over it, running in hot rivulets down across my belly. ‘The Tall Castle wouldn’t fall to marsh corpses.’ I shook my head. ‘And your men are too scared to slit your throat.’ I blinked. He stood there, the water rippling around his high boots, solid and meaner than nails, not some grey spectre.

‘You’ll be a father within the hour, Jorg.’ He looked at his hands, spread them before his belt, turning them palm to back, back to palm.

‘Don’t—’ Loose fingers found a tighter grip on Gog’s hilt. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Ghosts know what they know.’ He turned to stare into the fog.

‘You’re not dead.’ It wasn’t possible. He couldn’t die. Not that old man. And not without me being the one to do it. ‘How –’

‘The wrong son died, Jorg.’ I never knew anyone to match Father’s talent for cutting across a man’s words without raising his voice. ‘It should have been William taken from the thorns. He had my strength. You were ever your mother’s whelp. Better Degran even than you. Better even him.’

‘Who killed you?’ I made it a demand.

‘Who?’ Those eyes found me again. I had thought it cold before. ‘My heart gave out, pounding that pretty Teuton of mine. What was it you called her? The Scorron whore.’

The waters rose about us, swirling, eddying around the trees. Knee-deep, thigh-deep.

My strength left me with each heartbeat, limbs icy, the only warmth that of the blood spilling from the old wound, the one Father gave me, the one that should never have healed. ‘You’ll be a father soon, Jorg. That little southern wife of yours will push out a son. In slime and blood, shouting at the world. Just like mine did. The Pope’s man failed. I told her, “send three, two at the least”, but the silly bitch sent just the one. Said he was her best. I had high hopes, but he failed.’

‘You knew?’ The flood reached my chest. Without its support I doubted I could stand. When it touched the wound I felt the coldness pour into me, as if black water were filling me like a hollow gourd.

‘It’s good that you won’t see your boy,’ my father told me. ‘You’re too weak to raise a son.’ His wolfskin lifted on the flood but it meant nothing to him. He watched me with just the hint of a smile, a thing as cold as his regard.

The water spilled around my neck, putting a chatter in my teeth, my hair floating around me, drawn by the current. The weight of my armour, of the sword held in a numb hand, the pull of the mud, all held me down.

I thought of my child, of Miana with the white hand seared on her belly, and a spark of anger lit in me despite the cold. ‘You were mine to kill, old man.’ I snarled it before the water closed my mouth and swallowed me.

I looked up at a distant surface through dark weeds – the tangled drift of my hair. Far above me, impossibly far, a rippled surface fracturing the daylight to send weak glimmers down into the icy depths. A hand hung over me, limp, reaching for the sky. My hand. The dim and greenish light moved ripple patterns across my fingers.

I stared. Stared at that distant sun. It could be a million miles away. Lundist had said a million. More than a million. The waters held me. I hung limp and stared until that twinkling patch of green-tinted light became all I could see, became my world.

Shapes resolved. Green-tinted. And it seemed, though the water held me, though my chest ached for air and my heart pounded behind my ribs, that I looked not at the sky through water, but through the faint green stain of Attar glass into an inn room. A room where a fire burned in the hearth, where Miana lay, and Katherine crouched at her side.

I saw the lichkin come for them, the door flying apart in splinters. It walked in, slow and measured, a bone-thing, shrouded in dead space where the eye can’t see. The creature had left us a trap in the Hollow Wood and waited for us to leave. While we lay drowning the lichkin slipped into Gottering.

Guardsmen came hard on its heels. On her heels. Somehow I knew the lichkin for a she. They fell choking, perhaps drowning with their own ghosts, strangled by lost loves, choked by disapproving parents, or whatever tawdry fragments of their past haunted them. We all carry the seeds of our own destruction with us, we all drag our history behind us like rusted chain.

Katherine rose to meet her.

‘You shouldn’t have come.’ Somehow Katherine’s voice reached me, cut through to my dying brain, past the thunder of my heart.

The lichkin advanced on Katherine, only its hands clear to me, white, bone-like, root-like. My vision pulsed and prickled. In a moment I would take the breath my body screamed for.

‘You don’t know much, dead-thing.’ Katherine stood before it, the muted reds of her travel-gown swaying around her. Even dying I saw her beauty. Without desire – just as a statement, like the glory of a stained-glass window, or the play of light and shadow across mountains. I saw her fear too, and the strength that held it down.

Those hands reached for her, fast but slowing, as if finding some invisible resistance.

‘You can’t be very old, dead-thing,’ she said. ‘It’s written in the oldest books. Sleep and death are brother and sister. The Bard knew it. For in death’s sleep what dreams will come? And believe me dead-thing, I know dreams.’

The lichkin howled and raised a grey swirl around Katherine. Her skirts whipped about her. At Katherine’s feet Miana twisted and moaned. Shapes moved in that swirl. Shapes and suggestions.

‘Enough,’ Katherine said, sharp voiced. ‘Ghosts, is it? But dreams are populated by ghosts and little else. Ghosts are made of dreams, dead dreams, lost dreams, bad dreams, dreams that get stuck in tight little circles, that carve their own rut in the fabric of the world and won’t let go.’

Katherine’s hand snaked out and caught something from the swirl, held it by the throat. To me it was Orscar from the monastery, Sunny lashed to the Bad Dogs’ pole, Lesha wanting me to save her, the boy in Albaseat beaten by the smith. You can’t save them all so why save any? She choked it, fingers turning white with strain. At the last Father’s face hung there, black with blood. And then, poof, it was gone, a wisp of smoke, nothing more.

Katherine stepped forward, a quick step. And the lichkin flinched. It turned to run. But she caught it. Caught its bone-white hand in hers. Katherine held the lichkin, rigid with effort, hand growing white, veins growing dark and darker still, but she refused to release it.

‘You shouldn’t have come.’

And I broke the surface. Retching and gasping, I sat up, the water about me a foot deep, eighteen inches maybe. No more. I drew in the sweetest breath and parted the black veil of my hair. All about me, at the edge of the Hollow Wood, the brothers sat, choking and gasping, spitting water, purple in the face.

The carriage jolted across frost-stiffened mud and Chella cursed again. On the bench opposite, Kai looked far more comfortable, on the edge of sleep almost, as if bounced in his nurse’s arms. She clutched the armrest, fingers white on the leather. Five years starved of necromancy, five years since the Ancrath boy had drained her, shrivelled up her power in the firestorm of his ghosts. She had thought the Dead King merely cruel to punish her so, to leave her stranded once more on the shores of life, plagued by the everyday aches and pains of flesh, mocked by trivialities like temperature. Now she appreciated his cunning too.

‘Damnation.’ Chella hugged her furs close about her. ‘Who made the autumn so chill?’

‘Who decided to hold Congression on the edge of winter?’ Kai asked. ‘That’s the more reasonable question.’

Chella felt cold, not reasonable. Kai’s easy manner irked her. She returned often now to the day the mire-ghouls had dragged him and the girl to her through the reeds. Mud and slime in their hair, horror frozen into their fresh young faces. Each display of his returning confidence, each hint of the mild contempt that hid behind his smile, made her regret deciding to use him the more. Better he had died with his pert little strumpet.

Necromancy at its heart is a guilty pleasure, a surrender to the darkest instinct. The fact that Golden Boy had picked up his old self-assurance again, his charm and his winning smile, as if he just dabbled in a secret vice, a necessary evil, dug at her moment to moment. That he proved so good at it made her want to claw the face off him. He seemed to think it something he could set aside when no longer required, like he had that girl. What was her name? Sula? She wondered if Kai could still remember it.

Necromancy has to cost you. It had certainly cost Chella. Jorg might have taken a bite for free, but all he got was a taste. Golden Boy on the other hand had picked it up as though it were nothing but juggling, and had yet to drop a ball.

‘I hate being alive,’ Chella spoke to the passing world through the carriage grille, hedgerows edged with hoarfrost so thick that every twig bristled with thorns of ice.

‘And yet we hang to it so dear,’ Kai said. ‘Sometimes by fingertips.’

He had walked the dry lands now. Thought he knew it all. Thought he knew both sides of the coin from his stumbling in the borders where newly dead sometimes lost their way. Chella wondered how the deep voyaging would change him. What it would be that took the ease from his smile. Somewhere past Absolution, in the places where angels fear to tread, maybe even across the black sands to the caves where lichkin dwell. It waited for him out there – and on the day of his dark epiphany she would forgive him his slights and his superiority for they would be broken things that no longer held use for him. Until that day, though … one more cheerful encouragement and she would take his face.

The roll and rock of the carriage made her stomach jump. Her bones ached so it hurt to sit. And the cold, the damp, insidious cold! She wiped her nose, leaving a glistening trail across the back of her hand, then sniffed, noting and pretending to ignore Kai’s look of faint disgust.

We play with corpses and my mucus offends him!

Being so alive made her petty and weak.

The carriage rolled to a halt, the coachman banging three times on the roof.

Kai looked up. ‘Trouble?’

Chella sensed nothing but in her diminished state that meant little. She shrugged, leaned forward, and opened the carriage door.

Axtis stood in the mud, his golden armour bright in the winter sun, hurting her eyes. More of the Gilden Guard pressed around him on horseback. ‘Smoke rising over the town ahead.’

‘Which town?’ Chella squinted. Leaving the carriage didn’t appeal, the sun promised warmth, but it lied.

‘Gottering.’

‘Never heard of it. Send riders ahead and drive on.’ She leaned back into the carriage and closed the door. ‘Two hundred and fifty men! Worried over smoke. If the place was one big bonfire we could ride through.’

‘Perhaps our friends have been here before us.’ Kai caught the mist of his breath and shaped it into a question mark, fading between them. Old tricks.

‘Lichkin are no one’s friends, Wind-sworn. You’d do well to remember that.’