Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3) (49 page)

Kai collapsed as Thantos flowed out, released in a single breath, red-tinged. Within an instant the lichkin was everywhere, insinuated into the shadows of the grand entrance, haunting the empty spaces. It would take the bravest of men to walk in from the failing light of day outside. It would take more than bravery for them to walk out again. At least alive.

Chella removed the thong from around her neck. The black vial depending from it had hung above her heart half the journey, nestled spider-like through long hours on the road, bounced there when Jorg of Ancrath had her. She hurried to Kai’s side and dribbled the contents into his mouth while he retched and stared unseeing. The vial held ichor from a lead-lined tomb. An agent of the Dead King had ridden hard to bring it to her on the road catching up with the column somewhere close to Tyrol. Three horses died under the man between Crath City and Tyrol. He didn’t tell her which tomb had been desecrated. But Chella knew.

‘You should have learned to fly. You could have taken that pretty nothing with you, Kai.’ She spat the words and tried to hate him.

The Dead King’s brew worked fast. Kai stopped choking. Knowing came back into his eyes. The thing that had last looked at Chella out of Artur Elgin now watched her from inside Kai. Though he might seize almost any corpse, the Dead King could not exercise his full might through them. It took time for him to settle into a dead man and strengthen him sufficiently to be a conduit for the terrors at his command. A necromancer, however, suitably prepared, provided a more robust host. And the contents of the vial accelerated the process beyond measure.

‘This is the palace?’ He sat up.

When you’re among lichkin you can imagine nothing worse. The Dead King is worse. Chella tried to speak but words wouldn’t come from her dry mouth.

The Dead King ignored her silence. Instead he flexed Kai’s limbs, clenched his fingers into fists, and drew his face into a death’s head grin. ‘This is good. Very good.’ He got to his feet. ‘I’m here in my power. Death in life.’ Again the smile, a sudden and unholy joy behind it. ‘More! More than my power!’ His voice hardly raised but it hurt her ears even so. ‘I am remade. I have my foundation once again. I am more.’

All around her the dead quickened. The guards’ still hearts beat with swift corruption, no longer the shambling things they had been when first returned but darker, stronger makings like the quick dead of the Cantanlona swamp. Her work of months there accomplished here in seconds by her master’s will.

For a moment the Dead King’s exultation rang through her. The power bleeding off him thrilled and terrified. But the joy ran from him quicker than it came, leaving only grim purpose.

‘Lead on.’ The Dead King stood. ‘They’re all inside I take it?’

Chella nodded. The horror hung around him, a sense of hurt and loss, betrayal of all things precious. She had never seen him commit an atrocity, never heard of any deed more wicked than the destruction of those who opposed him, and yet she knew without question he was the worst of them.

‘Now.’ The word hurt her. She obeyed without hesitation this time, leading through the vast and open gates, the Dead King behind her, and over two hundred dead men in their golden armour, bright-eyed and quick with the Dead King’s hunger.

‘It’s time,’ the Dead King said through Kai’s mouth. ‘To visit Congression. Kill the head and the body is ours. Mine.’

‘Open the door.’

I stepped through quick as quick. ‘Close it.’ And the steel slammed down behind me.

The rulers of many nations crowded around me. I had found a replacement for my blooded cloak, cleaned the iron-wood rod and hidden it up the length of my sleeve, wrist to shoulder. I stood ready to answer their questions.

‘Where is Costos Portico?’

‘What happened in there?’

‘How are the doors working?’

Dozens more, all together, in shades from angry through indignant and down into fearful.

‘Lights on me.’ And high above us the constellation of Builder-lights grew dim, save for a tight and brilliant grouping that lit the space about me.

That shut them up.

I walked toward the middle of the chamber and the light followed me, the point of illumination moving across ceiling and floor. In the shadows before the dais Gorgoth crouched, fingers to the stone flagstones. Two quick bounds took me up the dais steps and I sat upon the throne, letting the rod of office slip free and setting it across my lap.

It was the sitting down that broke the spell. An angry clamour rose among them. These were, after all, rulers of nations.

‘Costos is dead,’ I said and the Hundred fell silent to hear me. ‘His vote passes to his advisors. His advisors are dead. His bannermen also.’

‘Murderer!’ Czar Moljon, still clutching his broken finger.

‘Many times over,’ I agreed. ‘But the events in the Roman room are a mystery that none of you observed, that passed unseen by the guard. There will of course be an inquiry, I may be charged, an imperial court may be convened. These however are matters for another day. This is Congression, gentlemen, and we have matters of state to decide.’

‘How dare you sit in Adam’s chair?’ A white-haired king from the east.

‘No law denies me,’ I said. ‘And I was tired. In any event it was Honorous’s chair last and if any wish to dispute my occupancy they may approach to discuss the matter.’ I set one hand upon the iron-wood rod. ‘Seating arrangements do not make emperors, gentlemen. That’s what we’re here to vote upon.’

I beckoned Taproot to me and leaned back in the throne, as uncomfortable a chair as I’d ever sat upon. Taproot climbed the steps quick enough, coming from the shadows into the light. I motioned him closer still.

‘You’ve found out who my friends are and who my enemies are?’ I asked.

‘Jorg! You’ve given me no time. I’ve hardly started to mingle. I—’ The silk of his doublet flapped around him.

‘But you have, haven’t you? You knew already.’

‘I know some of them, watch me!’ He nodded, a sharp grin, quick then gone. No one is immune to flattery.

‘Then get out there and have Makin, Marten, Kent, and Rike stand close to four of them who wish me ill. Gorgoth too, if he will. Tell him everyone is going to die if I don’t get to be emperor. Those words.’

‘Everyone? The whole of Congression? Jorg! Excess is no—’

‘Everyone everywhere,’ I said. ‘Just tell him.’

‘Everywhere?’ His hands fell still for a moment.

‘The lights will go off in a short while. Tell my brothers to be ready. When the light returns those men need to be dead. Have another set of names ready and then another. If I have to I will vote myself emperor.’

And Taproot left the dais faster than he came.

‘You’re listening to me aren’t you, Fexler?’

No reply.

‘The Dead King is coming.’ I didn’t know how I knew, but I knew. ‘And he’ll bring the world to ruin. Starting here.’ I turned the rod over in my hands. Over and over. ‘And to stop him – that would take such a force, such an act of magic, of will, that it would spin that wheel of yours and set the world cracking apart … and if that happens … Michael gets his way and you machines burn us all.’

A faint pulse in the light.

‘I would be right to guess that somewhere beneath me is an enormous bomb, would I?’

Again, the quiver in the light.

I leaned back into my uncomfortable throne and twirled the iron-wood like a baton. Likely I would be the shortest-reigning emperor in history. Out amongst the Hundred, Miana watched me. The man beside her, portly with grey sideburns and my son in his arms, was my father-in-law, Lord of Wennith. He didn’t seem to be the man he was six years ago, but then who among us is?

A lord of middling years in brown suede and gold chains had been trying to catch my eye at the foot of the dais, and now moved on through coughing to raising his hand.

‘Yes, Lord … ?’

‘Antas of Andaluth.’ His realm bordered Orlanth to the south. ‘I have matters to discuss, King Jorg. The rights to the River Parl …’

‘Would that secure your support, Lord Antas?’

‘Well, I hesitate to put it so bluntly …’

‘The rights to the Cathun River purchased absolution for the death of my mother, and of my brother William. Did you know that, Lord Antas?’

‘Why, no …’

‘Do you not think some things are beyond purchase, Antas? Vote for me if you believe the empire needs me on the throne. The fate of a hundred nations shouldn’t tip on river rights, horse trading, and back scratching.’

He frowned at that. Red Kent stood behind him and just a little to the left. I guessed that Antas’s support had never been going to be mine however many rivers we agreed over.

‘Lights out,’ I said, and the throne room plunged into darkness.

I made a slow count to ten beneath the uproar. ‘Lights on!’

Antas sprawled at the base of the dais, neck broken. Kent had already moved on.

I stood up from the throne and the lights shone more brightly so I felt their heat upon me. It had to be now.

‘Men of empire!’ I raised my voice to reach the edges of the great hall, so even the Silent Sister, the Queen of the Red and Katherine could hear beyond the Gilden Gate.

All of them stopped to watch me, even with the murdered lying at their feet.

‘Men of empire. A better man than I would have won your support with the goodness of his deeds, the clarity of his vision, the truth of his words. But that better man is not here. That better man would fail before the dark tide that rushes toward us. Orrin of Arrow was the better man and yet he didn’t survive even to ask your support.

‘Dark times call for dark choices. Choose me.’

I walked the perimeter of the dais in measured steps, staring out across the shadowed heads of state. ‘There is an enemy at our gates. Even now. As we spend our words here, the Lord Commander spends the blood of better men to hold his city. This holy city at the heart of our broken empire. This holy city
is
the heart of our empire. And if you men, you servants of that empire, do not remake the ancient pact, if you do not set upon this throne a single man to carry the responsibility for all our peoples, then that heart will be cut out.

‘You can feel it, can you not, my lords? It doesn’t take the taint that the Gilden Gate keeps out for you to sense what approaches. It has festered in your kingdoms. The dead rising, the old laws being undone, magics spilling and spreading like contagion. Certainty has left us: the days smell of wrong.

‘Do this now. Do it as one. For the man upon this throne will have to face what comes. And if there is no emperor there will be no one to stand against the tide. And tell me, in your heart of hearts, do you truly want to be that man?’

‘Melodrama! How can you listen to this?’ Czar Moljon, perhaps emboldened by his pain. ‘Besides, no vote will be cast for two days yet.’

‘Taproot.’ I waved him forward.

‘The Congression must vote on its final day in a private ballot, but any candidate may force an early and open vote at any time, on the understanding that failure to win such a vote disbars them from future office.’ Taproot’s hands made as to close a weighty tome, though he spoke from memory.

‘Vote!’ I said and the lights came up.

‘The vote of Morrow for my grandson.’ My grandfather’s voice rang out clear.

‘And the holdings of Alba.’ My uncle beside him.

The women at the Gilden Gate drew away, a hurried motion.

‘I stand with Jorg of Renar.’ Ibn Fayed raised his fist and the four Moorish warriors beside him followed his motion.

‘Wennith for Jorg.’ Miana’s father.

‘And the north!’ Sindri, somewhere behind me. ‘Maladon, Charland, Hagenfast.’

‘We stand with the burned king.’ White-haired twins, jarls from the ice-wastes in black furs and steel.

Gilden Guard appeared at the gate, a crowd of them. They advanced, and as each man passed through he collapsed, boneless. The clatter made the Hundred turn.

Perhaps half a dozen guards lay motionless on our side of the gate having made it no more than a yard or so within. Scores more stood almost as still, filling the antechamber beyond.

We all felt
him
approach. How could you not?

‘Conaught for Jorg.’

‘Kennick for Jorg.’

My advisors cast their allotted votes, from Arrow to Orlanth. Others followed, a sense of urgency on them now, as if we each heard
his
footsteps beneath the announcing.

And there he stood, framed in the Gilden Gate, a creature that wore Kai Summerson’s skin and bones. I hoped Katherine had run and run fast.

‘Hello.’ He smiled. Both the word and the smile unnatural things, dragged from somewhere a man would never want to look.

The Dead King approached the Gilden Gate, hands raised, palms out. It seemed he encountered a sheet of glass, for he stopped, fingers flat against the obstruction. He craned Kai’s neck to one side, peering at us all as though we were rats in a trap.

‘A clever gate,’ he said. ‘But it’s only made of wood.’

He stepped back and his dead guards approached with poleaxes to destroy the frame of the gate within the arch.

‘Red March for Jorg.’ A stout grey woman bearing the vote for the Queen of Red’s hereditary seat.

‘The Thurtans for Jorg.’ The man buried in a horsehair robe, an iron crown on his brow.

And more, and still more.

‘How do we stand, Taproot?’ I asked.

‘Thirty-seven out of the forty required.’

Pieces of the Gilden Gate fell splintered to the ground. The Dead King’s presence reached in and men fell to their knees in despair. Even now more than half the votes held back, bound by years of prejudice and wrangling, Congression was a marketplace, to actually put an emperor on the throne, to end their own supremacy in those hundred kingdoms … many would rather die. But there are good deaths and there are bad deaths. The Dead King offered only the worse kind.

‘Attar for Jorg.’

‘Conquence for Jorg.’ Hemmet’s brother, giving away the Lord Commander’s supremacy in Vyene.

The remains of the gate fell in.

‘Scorron for Jorg.’ A stern old man, watching me with dislike.