King of Thorns (33 page)

A memory tickled me. Gohan. I knew a Gohan closer to home.

“Does your hospitality extend to my friend?” I asked, opening a hand toward Makin.

Ruth turned and led on into the house. “Don’t be shy. We’ve plenty for everyone. Well, enough in any case, and there’s no sin like an empty belly!”

I followed her, Makin at my heels. We both ducked to get under the lintel. I had half-expected the interior to be dripping with the mire but
the place looked clean and dry. A lantern burned on the table, brass and polished to a high shine as if it were a treasured heirloom. The place lay in shadows, the shutters closed as though night threatened. Makin sheathed his sword. I was not so polite.

I cast about. Something was missing. Or I was missing something.

Rike stood outside, looming over the Brothers who pressed about him. Foolish enough they looked, bristling with weaponry as two young girls ran past laughing. An old woman hobbled up with a bundle under her arm, oblivious to Grumlow’s daggers as she grumbled on by.

“Ruth,” I said.

“Sit! Sit!” she cried. “You look half-dead. You’re a just a boy. A big lad, but a boy. I can see it. And boys need feeding. Ain’t that right, Ma?” She put her hand to her neck, an unconscious gesture, and stroked her throat. Pale skin, very pale. She’d burn worse than Rike in the sun.

“They do.” The mother put her head around the entrance from what must be the only other room. Grey hair framed a stern face, softened by a kind mouth. “And what’s the boy’s name then?”

“Jorg,” I said. As much as I like to roll out my titles there is a time and a place.

“Makin,” said Makin, although Ruth only had eyes for me, which is odd because even if I were handsome before the burns, it’s Makin that has a way with…everyone.

“And is there a Master Millson?” Makin asked.

“Sit!” Ruth said. So I sat and Makin followed suit, taking the rocker by the empty fireplace. I leaned my blade against the table. The women gave it not so much as a glance.

Ruth picked up a woollen jerkin from behind my stool. “That Jamie would forget his head!”

“You have a husband?” I asked.

A frown crossed her like a cloud. “He went to the castle two years
back. To take service with the Duke.” She brightened. “Anyhow you’re too young for me. I should call Seska over. She’s as pretty as the morning.” She had mischief in her eye. Blue eyes, pale as forget-me-not.

“So what are you doing out here?” I asked. I’d taken a shine to Ruth. She had a spark in her and put me in mind of a serving girl named Rachel back at the Haunt. Something about her made me unaccountably horny. Unaccountable if you don’t count eight weeks on the road.

“Out here?” Distracted she put her fingers to her mouth, a pretty mouth it has to be said, and wiggled at one of her back teeth.

“Ma” came from the kitchen with an earthenware pot, carried in a blackened wooden grip to keep the heat from her fingers. Makin got up to help her with it but she paid him no heed. She looked tiny beside him, bowed under her years. She laid the pot before me and set her bony hand to the lid, hesitating. “Salt?”

“Why not?” I would have asked for honey but this wasn’t the Haunt. Salt porridge is better than plain, even when you’ve eaten salt and more salt at Duke Maladon’s tables for a week.

“Oh,” said Ruth. Her hand came away from her mouth with a tooth on her palm. Not a little tooth but a big molar from far back, with long white roots and dark blood smeared around it, so dark as to be almost black. “I’m sorry,” she said, holding her hand at arm’s length as if horrified by the tooth but unable to look away, eyes wide and murky.

“No matter,” I said. It’s strange how quickly impersonal lust can slip into revulsion. It probably crosses the tail end of that thin line the poets say divides love and hate.

“Perhaps we should eat?” Makin said.

My stomach rolled at the thought of food. The marsh stink, that had yet to fade, invaded the room with renewed vigour.

Ma returned with three wooden bowls, one decorated with carved flowers, and a chair that looked too fine for the house. She set the bowls on the table, the fancy one for me, one before the new chair. The third
she held onto, casting about for something, confusion in her eye. She put her hand to the side of her head, rubbing absently.

“Lost something?” I asked.

“A rocking chair.” She laughed. “A place this small. You wouldn’t think you could lose a thing like that!” Her hand came away from her head with a clump of white hair in it. Pink scalp showed where it came from. She looked at it with as much bewilderment as her daughter, studying her tooth.

“The Duke’s castle you say, Ruth?” Makin said from the rocker. “Which duke would that be?” Makin could take the awkward edge off a moment, but neither woman looked at him.

Ma stuffed the hair into her apron and shuffled back into the kitchen. Ruth set the tooth on the window ledge. “Is it supposed to be lucky?” she asked. “Losing a tooth. I thought I heard that once.” She opened the shutters. “To let the dawn in.”

“What duke rules here?” I asked.

Ruth smiled, the smallest smear of black blood at the corner of her mouth. “Why you
are
lost, aren’t you? Duke Gellethar of course!”

In that moment I realized what was missing. The dead baby, the box-child, he would lie in any idle shadow. But not here. These shadows were too full.

The front door banged open and little Jamie charged in. Boys of a certain age seem only to go flat out or not at all. He grazed the doorpost as he passed and lost a coin-sized patch of skin to a loose nail.

He ran up to me, grinning, snot on his upper lip. “Who’re you? Who’re you, mister?” Oblivious to the missing skin where dark muscle glistened like liver.

“So this would be the land of…” I ignored the boy and watched Ruth’s muddy eyes.

“Gelleth of course.” She opened the shutters. “Mount Honas is west of us. On a clear night you can sometimes see the lights.”

Makin may have been the man for maps, but I knew we were five
hundred miles and more from Gelleth and the dust I had made of its duke. You would need the eyes of the god of eagles to see Mount Honas from any window in the Cantanlona…and yet Ruth believed what she said.

She turned from the window, the right half of her as scarlet as if she’d been dipped in boiling water.

I stood up sharp enough, beating Makin out of his rocker. “Ladies, my thanks but we have to leave.”

“We?” the mother asked from the kitchen doorway, half-scarlet like her daughter but on the left rather than the right, as if together they might make an untouched woman and a wholly scalded one.

“There’s only you, Jorg,” Ruth said, the side of her face starting to blister and weep. “There’s only ever been you for us.” She spat two teeth—incisors, one upper, one lower—making a slot in her smile.

Makin slipped past me, out into the mist. I backed after him, sword held ready to ward the women off. Ruth’s smile held my gaze and I forgot her child. He clamped himself to my leg, the skin falling off him like wet paper. “Who’re you? Who’re you, mister?”

“Only you, Jorg,” said the mother, her head bald now but for random white tufts. “Since the sun came.” She lifted her hand to the window.

The mist lit with a yellow glow then shrivelled back, drawn across the marsh as if it were a tablecloth whipped away fast enough to leave everything in place.

Out across the marsh it seemed that a second sun rose, too terrible and too bright to look at, too awful to look away from. A Builders’ Sun.

In horrible unison both women started to scream. Ruth’s hair burst into flame. Her mother’s scalp smouldered. I shook Jamie from my leg and he crashed against the wall, pieces of his skin left adhering to my leggings. I backed away from the house. I recognized the screams. I had made the same sounds when Gog burned me. Justice made those screams when Father lit him up.

Once upon a time perhaps I might have thought two women running around on fire was a free show. Rike would laugh that laugh of his even now. Row would bet on which one would fall first. But of late my old tastes had gone sour. I had grown to understand this kind of pain. And whatever enchantments might have staged this show for me, these people had felt real. They had felt kind. A truth ran through this lie and I didn’t like it.

Outside the sun shone, watching us from a midmorning angle, and the screams sounded fainter, farther off.

“The hell?” Red Kent swung his head. “Where’d the mist go?”

“Ain’t that a thing.” Row spat.

The buildings dripped with mud. They looked rotted. The roofs were gone.

“What did you see in there, Makin?” I asked, watching the doorway. No fire. No smoke. It looked dark. As if the sun wasn’t reaching in even though the roof had gone.

He shook his head.

“They’re sinking,” Rike said.

I could see it. Inch by inch each of the houses sunk into the foulness of the marsh. The sound of it put me in mind of sex though nothing had been more distant from my thoughts.

“They’re going back,” Sim said. He kept his distance from the walls.

He had it right. If we were seeing true now the mist had gone, then those buildings sunk long ago and something had made the marsh vomit them up again just for us.

“What happened?” Makin asked, although his face said he’d rather not know.

“They were ghosts,” I said. “Summoned for my benefit.” Some tortured re-enactment of the suffering at Gelleth. People who died because of me. “They can’t hurt us.”

Within minutes the buildings were swallowed and no trace remained above the mud. I scanned the horizon. Nothing but stagnant pools for mile after mile. The retreating mist had cleared more than my sight though. A second veil had been drawn away. A more subtle kind of mist that had been with us since we first scented the marsh. The necromancy tingled in me. We stood on the surface of an ocean and the dead swam below. Something had been overwriting my power, blinding me. Something or someone.

“Show yourself, Chella!” I shouted.

The weight of her necromancy pulled me around to stare at the mire where she rose. She emerged by degrees, black slime sliding from her nakedness, her hair plastered around her shoulders, over the tops of her breasts. Ten yards of dark and treacherous mud stood between us. Row had his bow across his back, the Nuban’s bow lay strapped to Brath’s saddle. Grumlow at least had a dagger in hand. In both hands actually. But he didn’t seem tempted to throw either. Perhaps he just didn’t want to draw her attention to him.

None of us spoke. Not one of us reached for a bow. The necromancer had a magic to work on the living as well as the dead. Or at least a magic to work on men. The mire had tainted the flesh that I remembered so well, leaving it dark but still firm. The slime that ran from her, that dripped and clung, seemed to guide the eye, to gild each dark curve and point.

“Hello, Jorg,” she said.

She used Katherine’s words from the graveyard. Maybe what is spoken in such places is always heard by those who have married Death.

“You remember me.” I wondered how long she had been leading me
to this point. I had no doubt now that her creatures had torn down the bridge we hoped to cross.

“I remember you,” she said. “And the marsh remembers you. Marshes have long memories, Jorg, they suck down secrets and hold them close, but in the end, in the end, all things surface.”

I thought of the box at my hip and of the memories it held. “I suppose you’ve come to tell me not to stand against the Prince of Arrow?”

“Why? Do you think I have my hooks in him?”

I shook my head. “I would have smelled you on him.”

“You didn’t smell me here and this place reeks of death,” she said, always moving, slow gyrations and stretches, demanding the eye.

“To be fair, it reeks of so much more beside.”

“The Prince of Arrow has enough defenders, enough champions, he doesn’t need me. In any case, you don’t want to believe everything you read, and the older a book is the less reliable its stories.”

There were written prophecies too? That made me snarl. It was bad enough that every turn of the tarot card and toss of the rune sticks put Arrow on the throne. Now books, my oldest friends, had turned traitor. “So why are we here?” I asked. I knew, but I asked in any case.

“I’m here for you, Jorg,” she said, husky and seductive.

“Come and take me, Chella,” I said. I didn’t lift my sword but I turned it so the reflected light slid across her face. I didn’t ask what it was she wanted. Revenge doesn’t need explanation. “And
how
are you here?” A mountain had fallen on her in Gelleth and buried her deeper than deep.

She frowned at that. “The Dead King came for me.” And for a moment, just a moment, I swear I saw her shudder.

“The Dead King.” This was new. I had thought I understood—that she was after revenge, pure and simple, emotions I could appreciate. After all, I had dropped Mount Honas on her. “Did he send you?”

“I would have come anyway, Jorg. We have unfinished business.” Again the seduction, stilling the Brothers who had started to move.

“So who wants me more, Chella? You or this king of yours?”