EMPEROR
OF THORNS
Book Three of The Broken Empire
Mark Lawrence

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2013

Copyright © Mark Lawrence 2013

Jacket Layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013

Jacket Illustration © Jason Chan.

Mark Lawrence asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Map © Andrew Ashton

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007439065

Ebook Edition © August 2013 ISBN: 9780007439072

Version: 2020-01-13

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

The Story So Far

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Keep Reading …

An Afterthought

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Mark Lawrence

About the Publisher

Dedicated to my son, Bryn.

The Story So Far

For those of you who have had to wait a year for this book I provide a brief synopsis of books 1 and 2, so that your memories may be refreshed. Here I carry forward only what is of importance to the tale that follows.

1 Jorg’s mother and brother, William, were killed when he was nine: he hung hidden in the thorns and witnessed it. His uncle sent the assassins.

2 Jorg’s father, Olidan, is not a nice man. He killed Jorg’s dog when Jorg was six, and stabbed Jorg in the chest when he was fourteen.

3 Jorg’s father still rules in Ancrath, married now to Sareth. Sareth’s sister Katherine is Jorg’s step-aunt and something of an obsession for him.

4 Jorg accidentally (though not guiltlessly) killed his baby step-brother Degran.

5 A man named Luntar put Jorg’s memory of the incident in a box. Jorg has now recovered the memory.

6 A number of magically-gifted individuals work behind the many thrones of the Broken Empire, competing with each other and manipulating events to further their own control.

7 We left Jorg still on his uncle’s throne in Renar. The princes of Arrow lay dead, their army shattered and the six nations gathered under Orrin of Arrow’s rule ripe for the picking.

8 We left Jorg the day after his wedding to twelve-year-old Queen Miana.

9 Jorg had sent men to recover his badly-wounded chancellor, Coddin, from the mountainside.

10 Katherine’s diary was found in the destruction outside the Haunt – whether she survived where her baggage train did not is unknown.

11 Red Kent was badly burned in the fight.

12 Jorg discovered there are ghosts of the Builders in the network of machines they left behind.

13 Jorg learned from one such ghost, Fexler Brews, that what he calls magic exists because the Builder scientists changed the way the world works. They made it possible for a person’s will to affect matter and energy directly.

14 The gun Jorg used to conclude the siege on the Haunt was taken from Fexler Brews’ suicide.

15 The powers over necromancy and fire were burned out of Jorg when they nearly destroyed him at the finale of the battle for the Haunt.

16 The Dead King is a powerful individual who watches the living from the deadlands and has shown a particular interest in Jorg.

17 Chella, a necromancer, has become an agent of the Dead King.

18 Every four years the rulers of the hundred fragments of empire convene in the capital Vyene for Congression – a truce period during which they vote for a new emperor. In the hundred years since the death of the last steward no candidate has managed to secure the necessary majority.

19 In the earlier thread ‘Four Years Earlier’ we left Jorg at his grandfather’s castle on the Horse Coast. The mathmagician, Qalasadi, had escaped after failing to poison the nobles. The Builder-ghost, Fexler, had given Jorg the view-ring that offers interactive views of the world from satellites and other optical resources.

Prologue

Kai stood before the old-stone, a single rough block set upright in the days when men knew nothing but wood and rock and hunting. Or perhaps they knew more than that, for they had set the old-stone in a place of seeing. A point where veils thinned and lifted and secrets might be learned or told. A place where the heavens stood a little lower, such that the sky-sworn might touch them more easily.

The local men called the promontory ‘the Finger’, which Kai supposed was apt if dull. And if it were a finger then the old-stone stood on the knuckle. Here the finger lay sixty yards across and at the edges fell a similar distance to meet the marsh in a series of steep and rocky steps.

Kai took a deep breath and let the cold air fill his lungs, let the dampness infect him, slowed his heart, and listened for the high, sad voice of the old-stone, less of a sound than a memory of sound. His vision lifted from him with just a whisper of pain. The point of Kai’s perception vaulted skyward, leaving his flesh beside the monolith. He watched now from a bright valley between two tumbling banks of cloud, watched himself as a dot upon the Finger, and the promontory itself a mere sliver of land reaching out into the vastness of the Reed Sea. At this distance the River Rill became a ribbon of silver running to the Lake of Glass.

Kai flew higher. The ground fell away, growing more abstract with each beat of his mind-born wings. The mists swirled, and the clouds held him again in their cool embrace.

Is this what death is like? A cold whiteness, for ever and ever amen?

Kai resisted the cloud’s pull and found the sun again. The sky-sworn could so easily lose themselves in the vastness of the heavens. Many did, leaving flesh to die and haunting the empty spaces above. A core of selfishness bound Kai to his existence. He knew himself well enough to admit that. An old strand of greed, an inability to let go. Failings of a kind perhaps, but here an asset that would keep him whole.

He flew above the soft brilliance of the clouds, weaving his path amongst their turrets and towers. A seris broke the pillowed alabaster, ghost-faint even to the eye of Kai’s mind, its sinuous form plunging in and out of sight, a hundred feet long and thicker than a man. Kai called to it. The cloud-snake coiled on itself; describing lazy circles as it drew ever closer.

‘Old friend.’ Kai hailed it. As many as a hundred seris swarmed amid the thunderheads when the land-breaker storms came, but each seris knew what every seris knew, so to Kai’s mind there was only one. Perhaps the seris were remnants of sky-sworn who had forgotten themselves, forgotten all that they were to dance among the clouds. Or maybe they had always been, requiring no birth and knowing no death.

The seris fixed Kai with the cold blue glow of its eye-pits. He felt the chill of its mind-touch, slow and curious. ‘Still the woman?’

‘Always the woman.’ Kai watched the light on the clouds. Architectural clouds, just ready for God’s hand to shape, ready to be cathedrals, towers, monsters … It amused him that the seris thought he always brought the same girl to the Finger.

Maybe seris think there’s just one man, one woman, and lots of bodies.

The seris moved around Kai in a corkscrew, as if he were there in person, cocooning him in its coils. ‘You would have one shadow?’

Kai smiled. The seris thought of human love as clouds coming together, sometimes brushing one to another, sometimes building to a storm, sometimes lost one in the other – casting one shadow.

‘Yes, to have one shadow.’ Kai surprised himself with the heat in his voice. He wanted what the seris had. Not just a roll in the heather. Not this time.

‘Make it.’ The voice of the seris spoke beneath his skin, though he had left that far below.

‘Make it happen? It isn’t that easy.’

‘You do not want?’ The seris rippled. Kai knew it for laughter.

‘Oh, I want.’ She just has to walk in the room and I’m on fire. The scent of her! I close my eyes and I’m in the Gardens of Bethda.

‘A storm comes.’ Sorrow tinged the seris’s voice.

Kai puzzled. He’d seen no sign of a storm brewing.

‘They rise,’ the seris said.

‘The dead?’ Kai asked, the old fear creeping over him.

‘Worse.’ One word, too much meaning.

‘Lichkin?’ Kai stared, he could see nothing. Lichkin only come in the dark.

‘They rise,’ the seris said.

‘How many?’ Don’t let it be all seven! Please.

‘Many. Like the rain.’ The seris left. The mist from which it wove its body drifted formless. Kai had never seen a seris fall apart like that. ‘Make one shadow.’ The voice hung in the air.

Kai’s vision arrowed toward the ground. He dived for the Finger. Sula stood at the fingertip, on the very edge, a white dot, growing swiftly. Sight slammed into body, hard enough to make him fall to his knees. He scrambled up, disoriented for a moment, then tore off toward Sula. He reached her in less than a minute, and bent double before her, heaving in his breath.

‘You were a long time.’ Sula turned at his approach. ‘I thought you’d forgotten about me, Kai Summerson.’

‘Forgive me, my lady?’ he gasped, and grinned, her beauty pushing away his panic. It seemed silly now. From on high he’d seen nothing to worry him.

Sula’s pout became smile, the sun reached down to light her face, and for a moment Kai forgot about the seris’s warning. Lichkin travel at night. He took her hands and she came to him. She smelled of flowers. The softness of her breasts against his chest made his heart skip. For a moment he could see only her eyes and lips. The fingers of one hand locked with hers, the other ran along her throat, feeling the pulsing heat of her.

‘You shouldn’t stand so close to the edge,’ he said, though she stole his breath. Just a yard behind her the tip of the Finger crumbled away into two hundred feet of cliffs, stepping sharply down into the surrounding marsh.

‘You sound like Daddy.’ Sula cocked her head and leaned into him. ‘You know, he even told me not to go with you today? That Kai Summerson is low-born trash, he said. He wanted me to stay cooped up in Morltown while he did his business deals.’

‘What?’ Kai let go of Sula’s hands. ‘You said he agreed.’

Sula giggled and put on a gruff voice. ‘I’ll not have my daughter gallivanting with a Guardian captain!’ She laughed and returned to her normal tones. ‘Did you know, he thinks you have a “reputation”?’

Kai did have a reputation, and a man like Merik Wineland could make things very difficult for him.

‘Look, Sula, we’d better go. There may be trouble coming.’

The tight little lines of a frown marred Sula’s perfect brow. ‘Trouble coming?’

‘I had an ulterior motive for bringing you here,’ Kai said.

Sula grinned where other girls might blush.

‘Not that,’ Kai said. ‘Well, that too, but I was scheduled to check the area. Observe the marsh.’

‘I’ve been watching from the cliff while you were gone. There’s nothing down there!’ Sula turned from him and gestured to the green infinity of the mire. Then she saw it. ‘What’s that?’

Across the Reed Sea a mist was rising. It ran in white streams, spreading from the east, blood-tinged by the setting sun.

‘They’re coming.’ Kai struggled to speak. He found his voice and tried a confident smile. It felt like a grimace. ‘Sula, we have to move fast. I need to report to Fort Aral. I’ll get you over the Mextens and leave you at Redrocks. You’ll be safe there. A wagon will get you to Morltown.’

The darts flew with a noise like somebody blowing out candles, a series of short sudden breaths. Three clustered just below Sula’s right armpit. Three thin black darts, stark against the whiteness of her dress. Kai felt the sting in his neck, like the bite of horseflies.

The mire ghouls swarmed over the tip of the Finger, grey and spider-like, swift and silent. Kai ripped his short sword from its scabbard. It felt heavier than lead. The numbness was in his fingers already and the sword fell from his clumsy grasp.

A storm’s coming.

1

I failed my brother. I hung in the thorns and let him die and the world has been wrong since that night. I failed him, and though I’ve let many brothers die since, that first pain has not diminished. The best part of me still hangs there, on those thorns. Life can tear away what’s vital to a man, hook it from him, one scrap at a time, leaving him empty-handed and beggared by the years. Every man has his thorns, not of him, but in him, deep as bones. The scars of the briar mark me, a calligraphy of violence, a message blood-writ, requiring a lifetime to translate.

The Gilden Guard always arrive on my birthday. They came for me when I turned sixteen, they came to my father and to my uncle the day I reached twelve. I rode with the brothers at that time and we saw the guard troop headed for Ancrath along the Great West Road. When I turned eight I saw them first hand, clattering through the gates of the Tall Castle on their white stallions. Will and I had watched in awe.

Today I watched them with Miana at my side. Queen Miana. They came clattering through a different set of gates into a different castle, but the effect was much the same, a golden tide. I wondered if the Haunt would hold them all.

‘Captain Harran!’ I called down. ‘Good of you to come. Will you have an ale?’ I waved toward the trestle tables set out before him. I’d had our thrones brought onto the balcony so we could watch the arrival.

Harran swung himself from the saddle, dazzling in his fire-gilt steel. Behind him guardsmen continued to pour into the courtyard. Hundreds of them. Seven troops of fifty to be exact. One troop for each of my lands. When they had come four years before, I warranted just a single troop, but Harran had been leading it then as now.

‘My thanks, King Jorg,’ he called up. ‘But we must ride before noon. The roads to Vyene are worse than expected. We will be hard pushed to reach the Gate by Congression.’

‘Surely you won’t rush a king from his birthday celebrations just for Congression?’ I sipped my ale and held the goblet aloft. ‘I claim my twentieth year today, you know.’

Harran made an apologetic shrug and turned to review his troops. More than two hundred were already crowded in. I would be impressed if he managed to file the whole contingent of three hundred and fifty into the Haunt. Even after extension during the reconstruction, the front courtyard wasn’t what one would call capacious.

I leaned toward Miana and placed a hand on her fat belly. ‘He’s worried if I don’t go there might be another hung vote.’

She smiled at that. The last vote that was even close to a decision had been at the second Congression – the thirty-third wasn’t likely to be any nearer to setting an emperor on the throne than the previous thirty.

Makin came through the gates at the rear of the guard column with a dozen or so of my knights, having escorted Harran through the Highlands. A purely symbolic escort since none in their right mind, and few even in their wrong mind, would get in the way of a Gilden Guard troop, let alone seven massed together.

‘So Miana, you can see why I have to leave you, even if my son is about to fight his way out into the world.’ I felt him kick under my hand. Miana shifted in her throne. ‘I can’t really say no to seven troops.’

‘One of those troops is for Lord Kennick, you know,’ she said.

‘Who?’ I asked it only to tease her.

‘Sometimes I think you regret turning Makin into my lord of Kennick.’ She gave me that quick scowl of hers.

‘I think he regrets it too. He can’t have spent more than a month there in the last two years. He’s had the good furniture from the Baron’s Hall moved to his rooms here.’

We fell silent, watching the guard marshal their numbers within the tight confines of the courtyard. Their discipline put all other troops to shame. Even Grandfather’s Horse Coast cavalry looked a rabble next to the Gilden Guard. I had once marvelled at the quality of Orrin of Arrow’s travel guard, but these men stood a class apart. Not one of the hundreds didn’t gleam in the sun, the gilt on their armour showing no sign of dirt or wear. The last emperor had deep pockets and his personal guard continued to dip into them close on two centuries after his death.

‘I should go down.’ I made to get up, but didn’t. I liked the comfort. Three weeks’ hard riding held little appeal.

‘You should.’ Miana chewed on a pepper. Her tastes had veered from one extreme to another in past months. Of late she’d returned to the scalding flavours of her homeland on the Horse Coast. It made her kisses quite an adventure. ‘I should give you your present first though.’

I raised a brow at that and tapped her belly. ‘He’s cooked and ready?’

Miana flicked my hand away and waved to a servant in the shadows of the hall. At times she still looked like the child who’d arrived to find the Haunt all but encircled, all but doomed. At a month shy of fifteen the most petite of serving girls still dwarfed her, but at least pregnancy had added some curves, filled her chest out, put some colour in her cheeks.

Hamlar came out with something under a silk cloth, long and thin, but not long enough for a sword. He offered it to me with a slight bow. He’d served my uncle for twenty years but had never shown me a sour glance since I put an end to his old employment. I twitched the cloth away.

‘A stick? My dear, you shouldn’t have.’ I pursed my lips at it. A nice enough stick it had to be said. I didn’t recognize the wood.

Hamlar set the stick on the table between the thrones and departed.

‘It’s a rod,’ Miana said. ‘Lignum Vitae, hard, and heavy enough to sink in water.’

‘A stick that could drown me …’

She waved again and Hamlar returned with a large tome from my library held before him, opened to a page marked with an ivory spacer.

‘It says there that the Lord of Orlanth won the hereditary right to bear his rod of office at the Congressional.’ She set a finger to the appropriate passage.

I picked the rod up with renewed interest. It felt like an iron bar in my hand. As King of the Highlands, Arrow, Belpan, Conaught, Normardy, and Orlanth, not to mention overlord of Kennick, it seemed that I now held royal charter to carry a wooden stick where all others must walk unarmed. And thanks to my pixie-faced, rosy-cheeked little queen, my stick would be an iron-wood rod that could brain a man in a pot-helm.

‘Thank you,’ I said. I’ve never been one for affection or sentiment, but I liked to think we understood each other well enough for her to know when something pleased me.

I gave the rod an experimental swish and found myself sufficient inspiration to leave my throne. ‘I’ll look in on Coddin on the way down.’

Coddin’s nurses had anticipated me. The door to his chambers stood open, the window shutters wide, musk sticks lit. Even so the stench of his wound hung in the air. Soon it would be two years since the arrow struck him and still the wound festered and gaped beneath the physician’s dressings.

‘Jorg.’ He waved to me from his bed, made up by the window and raised so he too could see the guard arrive.

‘Coddin.’ The old sense of unfocused guilt folded around me.

‘Did you say goodbye to her?’

‘Miana? Of course. Well …’

‘She’s going to have your child, Jorg. Alone. Whilst you’re off riding.’

‘She’ll hardly be alone. She has no end of maids and ladies-in-waiting. Damned if I know their names or recognize half of them. Seems to be a new one every day.’

‘You played your part in this, Jorg. She will know you’re absent when the time comes and it will be harder on her. You should at least make a proper goodbye.’

Only Coddin could lecture me so.

‘I said … thank you.’ I twirled my new stick into view. ‘A present.’

‘When you’re done here go back up. Say the right things.’

I gave the nod that means perhaps. It seemed to be enough for him.

‘I never tire of watching those boys at horse,’ he said, glancing once more at the gleaming ranks below.

‘Practice makes perfect. They’d do better to practise war though. Being able to back a horse into a tight corner makes a pretty show but—’

‘So enjoy the show!’ He shook his head, tried to hide a grimace, then looked at me. ‘What can I do for you, my king?’

‘As always,’ I said. ‘Advice.’

‘You hardly need it. I’ve never even seen Vyene, not even been close. I haven’t got anything that will help you in the Holy City. Sharp wits and all that book learning should serve you well enough. You survived the last Congression, didn’t you?’

I let that memory tug a bleak smile from me. ‘I’ve got some measure of cleverness perhaps, old man, but what I need from you is wisdom. I know you’ve had my library brought through this chamber one book at a time. The men bring you tales and rumour from all corners. Where do my interests lie in Vyene? Where shall I drop my seven votes?’

I stepped closer, across the bare stones. Coddin was ever the soldier: no rugs or rushes for him even as an invalid.

‘You don’t want to hear my wisdom, Jorg. If that’s what it is.’ Coddin turned to the window again, the sun catching his age, and catching the lines that pain had etched into him.

‘I had hoped you’d changed your mind,’ I said. There are hard paths and there are the hardest paths.

The stench of his wound came stronger now I stood close. Corruption is nibbling at our heels from the hour we’re born. The stink of rot just reminds us where our feet are leading us, whichever direction they point in.

‘Vote with your father. Be at peace with him.’

Good medicines often taste foul, but some pills are too bitter to swallow. I paused to take the anger from my voice. ‘It’s been nearly more than I can do not to march my armies into Ancrath and lay waste. If it’s a struggle to keep from open war … how can there be peace?’

‘You two are alike. Your father perhaps a touch colder, more stern and with less ambition, but you fell from the same tree and similar evils forged you.’

Only Coddin could tell me I was my father’s son and live. Only a man who had already died in my employ and lay rotting in my service still, out of duty, only such a man could speak that truth.

‘I don’t need him,’ I said.

‘Didn’t this ghost of yours, this Builder, tell you two Ancraths together would end the power of the hidden hands? Think, Jorg! Sageous set your uncle against you. Sageous wanted you and your brother in the ground. And failing that he drove a wedge between father and son. And what would end the power of men like Sageous, of the Silent Sister, Skilfar, and all their ilk? Peace! An emperor on the throne. A single voice of command. Two Ancraths! You think your father has been idle all this time, the years that grew you, and the years before? He may not have your arching ambition, but he is not without his own measure. King Olidan has influence in many courts. I won’t say he has friends, but he commands loyalty, respect, and fear in equal measures. Olidan knows secrets.’

‘I know secrets.’ Many I did not wish to know.

‘The Hundred will not follow the son whilst the father stands before them.’

‘Then I should destroy him.’

‘Your father took that path – it made you stronger.’

‘He faltered at the last.’ I looked at my hand, remembering how I had lifted it from my chest, dripping crimson. My blood, father’s knife. ‘He faltered. I will not.’

If it had been the dream-witch who drove a wedge between us then he had done his job well. It wasn’t in me to forgive my father. I doubted it was in him to accept such forgiveness.

‘The hidden hands might think two Ancraths will end their power. Me, I think one is enough. It was enough for Corion. Enough for Sageous. I will be enough for all of them if they seek to stop me. In any event, you know in what high esteem I hold prophecy.’

Coddin sighed. ‘Harran is waiting for you. You have my advice. Carry it with you. It won’t slow you down.’

The captains of my armies, nobles from the Highlands, a dozen lords on petitioning visits from various corners of the seven kingdoms, and scores of hangers-on all waited for me in the entrance hall before the keep doors. The time when I could just slip away had … just slipped away. I acknowledged the throng with a raised hand.

‘My lords, warriors of my house, I’m off to Congression. Be assured I will carry your interests there along with my own and present them with my usual blend of tact and diplomacy.’

That raised a chuckle. I’d bled a lot of men dry to take my little corner of empire so I felt I should play out the game for my court, as long as it cost me nothing. And besides, their interests lay with mine, so I hardly lied.

I singled Captain Marten out amongst the crowd, tall and weathered, nothing of the farmer left in him. I gave no rank higher than captain but the man had led five thousand soldiers and more in my name.

‘Keep her safe, Marten. Keep them both safe.’ I put a hand to his shoulder. Nothing else needed to be said.

I came into the courtyard flanked by two knights of my table, Sir Kent and Sir Riccard. The spring breeze couldn’t carry the aroma of horse sweat away fast enough, and the herd of more than three hundred appeared to be doing their best to leave the place knee-deep in manure. I find that massed cavalry are always best viewed from a certain distance.

Makin eased his horse through the ranks to reach us. ‘Many happy returns, King Jorg!’

‘We’ll see,’ I said. It all felt a little too comfortable. Happy families with my tiny queen above. Birthday greetings and a golden escort down below. Too much soft living and peace can choke a man sure as any rope.

Makin raised an eyebrow but said nothing, his smile still in place.

‘Your advisors are ready to ride, sire.’ Kent had taken to calling me sire and seemed happier that way.

‘You should be taking wise heads not men-at-arms,’ Makin said.

‘And who might you be bringing, Lord Makin?’ I had decided to let him select the single advisor his vote entitled him to bring to Congression.

He pointed across the yard to a scrawny old man, pinch-faced, a red cloak lifting around him as the wind swirled. ‘Osser Gant. Chamberlain to the late Baron of Kennick. When I’m asked what my vote will cost, Osser’s the man who will know what is and what isn’t of worth to Kennick.’

I had to smile at that. He might pretend it wasn’t so, but part of old Makin wanted to play out his new role as one of the Hundred in grand style. Whether he would model his rule on my father’s or that of the Prince of Arrow remained unclear.

‘There’s not much of Kennick that ain’t marsh, and what the Ken Marshes need is timber. Stilts, so your muddy peasants’ houses don’t sink overnight. And you get that from me now. So don’t let your man forget it.’

Makin coughed as if some of that marsh had got into his chest. ‘So who exactly are you taking as advisors?’

It hadn’t been a difficult choice. Coddin’s final trip came when they carried him down from the mountain after the battle for the Haunt. He wouldn’t travel again. I had grey heads aplenty at court, but none whose contents I valued. ‘You’re looking at two of them.’ I nodded to Sirs Kent and Riccard. ‘Rike and Grumlow are waiting outside, Keppen and Gorgoth with them.’

‘Christ, Jorg! You can’t bring Rike! This is the emperor’s court we’re talking about! And Gorgoth? He doesn’t even like you.’

I drew my sword, a smooth glittering motion, and hundreds of golden helms turned to follow its arc. I held the blade high, turning it this way and that to catch the sun. ‘I’ve been to Congression before, Makin. I know what games they play there. This year we’re going to play a new game. Mine. And I’m bringing the right pieces.’

2

Several hundred horsemen throw up a lot of dust. We left the Matteracks in a shroud of our own making, the Gilden Guard stretched out across half a mile of winding mountain path. Their gleam didn’t survive long and we made a grey troop as we came to the plains.

Makin and I rode together along the convolutions of the track on which we once met the Prince of Arrow, headed for my gates. Makin looked older now, a little iron in the black, worry lines across his brow. On the road Makin had always seemed happy. Since we came to wealth and fortune and castles he had taken to worry.

‘Will you miss her?’ he asked. For an hour just the clip and clop of hooves on stony ground, and then from nowhere, ‘Will you miss her?’

‘I don’t know.’ I’d grown fond of my little queen. When she wanted to she could excite me, as most women could: my eye is not hard to please. But I didn’t burn for her, didn’t need to have her, to keep her in my sight. More than fondness, I liked her, respected her quick mind and ruthless undercurrents. But I didn’t love her, not the irrational foolish love that can overwhelm a man, wash him away and strand him on unknown shores.

‘You don’t know?’ he asked.

‘We’ll find out, won’t we?’ I said.

Makin shook his head.

‘You’re hardly the champion of true love, Lord Makin,’ I told him. In the six years since we came to the Haunt he had kept no woman with him, and if he had a mistress or even a favourite whore he had them well hidden.

He shrugged. ‘I lost myself on the road, Jorg. Those were black years for me. I’m not fit company for any woman I’d desire.’

‘What? And I am?’ I turned in the saddle to watch him.

‘You were young. A boy. Sin doesn’t stick to a child’s skin the way it clings to a man’s.’

My turn to shrug. He had seemed happier when murdering and robbing than he did thinking back on it in his vaulted halls. Perhaps he just needed something to worry about again, so he could stop worrying.

‘She’s a good woman, Jorg. And she’s going to make you a father soon. Have you thought about that?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It had slipped my mind.’ In truth though it surfaced in my thoughts in each waking hour, and many dreaming ones. I couldn’t find a way to grip the idea and it did indeed slip from me. I knew a squalling infant would soon appear, but what that would mean to me – what it was to be a father – I had no hold on. Coddin told me I would know how to feel. Instinct would tell me – something written in the blood. And perhaps it would come to me, like a sneeze arriving when pepper’s in the air, but until it did I had no way of imagining it.

‘Perhaps you’ll be a good father,’ Makin said.

‘No.’ Whether I somehow came to understand the process or not I would make a poor father. I had failed my brother and I would doubtless fail my son. Somehow the curse Olidan of Ancrath bestowed on me, and got most likely from his own sire, would infect any child of mine.

Makin pursed his lips but had the grace or the wisdom not to argue.

There’s not much of the Renar Highlands that lies flat enough to grow crops on, but close to the border with Ancrath the land stops leaping and diving long enough for farming and for a city, of sorts. Hodd Town, my capital. I could see the stain of it on the horizon.

‘We’ll camp here,’ I said.

Makin leaned in his saddle to tell Sir Riccard, and he raised my colours on his lance.

‘We could make Hodd Town,’ Makin said. ‘We’d be there an hour or so past sunset.’

‘Bad beds, grinning officials, and fleas.’ I swung out of Brath’s saddle. ‘I’d rather sleep in a tent.’

Gorgoth sat down. He let the guard work around him, tethering their horses, organizing their feed, setting up pavilions, each big enough for six men, with two ribbons streaming from the centre-point, the emperor’s black and gold. Keppen and Grumlow threw their saddlebags beside the leucrota and sat on them to play dice.

‘We should at least pass through town tomorrow, Jorg.’ Makin tied off the feedbag on his mount’s nose and turned back to me. ‘The people love to see the guard ride past. You can give them that at least?’

I shrugged. ‘It should be enough that I keep court in the Highlands. Do you think they’ve forgotten that I’ve a palace bigger than the whole of Hodd Town down in Arrow?’

Makin kept his eyes on mine. ‘Sometimes it seems you’ve forgotten it, Jorg.’

I turned away and squatted to watch the dice roll. The ache in my thighs told me I’d been too long in the throne and the bed and the banquet hall. Makin had it right, I should travel my seven kingdoms, even if it were only to spend time on the road and keep its lessons sharp in my mind.

‘Son of a bitch!’ Keppen spat. All five of Grumlow’s dice showed sixes. Keppen started to empty his coin pouch, spat again, and threw the whole lot down at Grumlow’s feet. I shook my head. It seemed a waste of good fortune to buck such odds for a pouch of coin.

‘Don’t use up all your luck, Brother Grumlow. You might need it later.’ I stood again, biting back a curse at my legs.

I hadn’t wanted to live in the palace Prince Orrin had built for Katherine. I spent a few weeks there after we had secured the allegiance of Arrow’s surviving lords. The building reminded me of Orrin, austere but splendid, high arches, pillars of white stone, it could have been copied from the ruins of Macedon where Alexander grew to greatness. I rattled around in its many rooms with the brothers as my guards, and my captains planning the capture of Arrow’s remaining conquests. The palace felt deserted despite a staff of hundreds, strangers all of them. In the end I’d been glad to ride out to secure Normardy, somehow a relief though it proved the bloodiest of that spring’s campaigns.

If life in the Haunt had left me too soft for a day in the saddle then I was wise to avoid the luxury of that palace. Better the mountains than the plains, better the howl of the wind about snow-clad peaks than the foul air blowing off the Quiet Sea laden with the stench of the Drowned Isles. Besides, in Ancrath and in Renar the blood of my line ran thickest. I might not hunger for the warmth of family but in troubled times it’s wiser to be surrounded by subjects who follow out of habit rather than out of new-found fear.

A gentle rain began to fall as the light faded. I pulled my cloak tighter and moved to one of the campfires.

‘A tent for the king!’ Sir Riccard shouted, catching the arm of a passing guardsman.

‘A little wet won’t hurt me,’ I told him. A good swordsman, Riccard, and brave, but rather too taken with his rank and with shouting.

Time spent around a fire, among the bustle of warriors, was more to my liking than watching the walls of a tent twitch and flap, and imagining what might lie behind them. I watched the guards organize their camp and let the aroma of the stew-pots tease my nose.

When you are a troop of more than three hundred, a small army by most reckonings, all the simple matters of the road require discipline. Latrine trenches must be dug, a watch organized on a defensible perimeter, horses taken to graze and water. Gone the easy ways that suited our band of brothers on the roads of my childhood. Scale changes everything.

A guard captain came with a chair for me, a piece of campaign furniture that would fold down again to a tight flat package with brass-bound corners to weather the knocks and bumps of travel. Captain Harran found me sat in it with a bowl of venison and potatoes in my lap, food from my own stores at the Haunt, no doubt. The guard expected to provision wherever they stopped – a kind of highway robbery legalized by the last echoes of empire.

‘There’s a priest wanting to see you,’ Harran said. I let him drop ‘King Jorg’ into my expectant silence. The captains of the Gilden Guard hold the Hundred in mild contempt and are wont to laugh at our titles behind their oh-so-shiny helms.

‘A priest? Or perhaps the Bishop of Hodd Town?’ I asked. The Gilden Guard have little respect for the church of Roma either, a legacy of centuries punctuated by vicious squabbles between emperors and Popes. For the emperor’s loyalists Vyene is the holy city and Roma an irrelevance.

‘Yes, a bishop.’ Harran nodded.

‘The silly hat gives them away,’ I said. ‘Sir Kent, if you could go and escort Father Gomst to our little circle of piety. I wouldn’t want him coming to grief amongst the guard.’

I sat back in my chair and swigged from a tankard of ale they’d brought me, sour stuff from the breweries of the Ost-Reich. Rike watched the fire, gnawing on a bone from his meal. Most men watch the flames as if seeking answers in the mystery of that bright dance. Rike just scowled. Gorgoth came across and elbowed a space close enough that the glow lit him. Like me he had a measure of understanding when he stared into the flames. The magic I’d borrowed from Gog burned out of me on the day we turned the men of Arrow from the Haunt – it was never truly mine. I think, though, that Gorgoth had wet his hands in what Gog swam through. Not fire-sworn like Gog, but with a touch of it running in his veins.

Grumlow alerted us to Bishop Gomst’s approach, pointing out the mitre swaying above the heads of guardsmen lined for the mess tent. We watched as he emerged, arriving in full regalia with his crook to lean on and a shuffle in his feet, though he had no more years on him than Keppen who could run up a mountain before lunch if the need arose.

‘Father Gomst,’ I said. I’d been calling him that since I could call him anything at all and saw no reason to change my ways just because he’d changed his hat.

‘King Jorg.’ He bowed his head. The rain started to thicken.

‘And what brings the Bishop of Hodd Town out on a damp night like this when he could be warming himself before the votive candles banked in his cathedral?’ A sore point since the cathedral stood half built. I still poked at old Gomsty as if he were stuck in that cage we found him in years back on the lichway. My uncle had over-reached himself when he commissioned the cathedral project, a poorly judged plan conceived the same year my mother squeezed me into the world. Perhaps another bad decision. In any event, the money had run out. Cathedrals don’t come cheap, not even in Hodd Town.

‘I needed to speak with you, my king. Better here than in the city.’ Gomst stood with the rain dripping from the curls of his crook, bedraggled in his finery.

‘Get the man a chair,’ I shouted. ‘You can’t leave a man of God standing in the muck.’ Then in a lower voice, ‘Tell me, Father Gomst.’

Gomst took his time to sit, adjusting his robes, the hems thick with mud. I expected him to come with a priest or two, a church boy to carry his train at least, but my bishop sat before me unattended, dark with rain, and looking older than his years.

‘There was a time when the seas rose, King Jorg.’ He held his crook white-knuckled and stared at the other hand in his lap. Gomst never told stories. He scolded or he flattered, according to the cloth of his audience.

‘The seas rise each day, Father Gomst,’ I said. ‘The moon draws on the deep waters as it draws on women’s blood.’ I knew he spoke of the Flood, but tormenting him came too easy.

‘There were untold years when the seas lay lower, when the Drowned Isles were one great land of Brettan, and the Never Lands fed an empire, before the Quiet Sea stole them. But the waters rose and a thousand cities drowned.’

‘And you think the oceans ready themselves for another bite?’ I grinned and held a hand out to accept the rain. ‘Will it pour for forty days and nights?’

‘Have you had a vision?’ A question rasped from scorched lungs. Red Kent had come to squat beside Gomst’s chair. Since surviving the inferno at the Haunt Sir Kent had got himself a bad case of religion.

‘It seems I chose well when making court in the mountains,’ I said. ‘Perhaps the Highland will become the richest island kingdom in the new world.’

Sir Riccard laughed at that. I seldom made a joke that didn’t find an echo in him. Makin twisted a grin. I trusted that more.

‘I speak of a different rising, a darker tide,’ Gomst said. He seemed determined to play the prophet. ‘Word comes from every convent, from Arrow, Belpan, Normardy, from the cold north and from the Port kingdoms. The most pious of the faith’s nuns dream of it. Hermits leave their caves to speak of what the night brings them, icons bleed to testify the truth. The Dead King readies himself. Black ships wait at anchor. The graves empty.’

‘We have fought the dead before, and won.’ The rain felt cold now.

‘The Dead King has overwhelmed the last of Brettan’s lords, he holds all the Isles. He has a fleet waiting to sail. The holiest see a black tide coming.’ Gomst looked up now, meeting my eyes.

‘Have you seen this, Gomst?’ I asked him.

‘I am not holy.’

That convinced me, of his belief and fear at least. I knew Gomst for a rogue, a goat-bearded letch with an eye for his own comfort and a taste for grand but empty oratory. Honesty from him spoke more than from another man.

‘You’ll come to Congression with me. Set this news before the Hundred.’

His eyes widened at that, rain stuttered from his lips. ‘I— I have no place there.’

‘You’ll come as one of my advisors,’ I told him. ‘Sir Riccard will cede his place to you.’

I stood, shaking the wet from my hair. ‘Damn this rain. Harran! Point me at my tent. Sir Kent, Riccard, see the bishop back to his church. I don’t want any ghoul or ghost troubling him on his return.’

Captain Harran had waited in the next fire circle and led me now to my pavilion, larger than the guards’, hide floors within, strewn with black and gold cushions. Makin followed in behind me, coughing and shaking off the rain, my bodyguard, though a pavilion had been set for him as Baron of Kennick. I shrugged off my cloak and it landed with a splat, leaking water.

‘Gomst sends us to bed with sweet dreams,’ I said, glancing around. A chest of provisions sat to my left and a commode had been placed on the opposite side. Silver lamps burning smokeless oil lit me to my bed, carved timber, four posted, assembled from pieces carried by a dozen different guards.

‘I’ve no faith in dreams.’ Makin set his cloak aside and shook like a wet dog. ‘Or the bishop.’

A chess set had been laid on a delicate table beside the bed, board of black and white marble, silver pieces, ruby-set or with emeralds to indicate the sides.

‘The guard lay their tents grander than my rooms at the Haunt,’ I said.

Makin inclined his head. ‘I don’t trust dreams,’ he repeated.

‘The women of Hodd Town wear no blues.’ I started to unbuckle my breastplate. I could have had a boy to do it, but servants are a disease that leaves you crippled.

‘You’re an observer of fashion now?’ Makin worked at his own armour, still dripping on the hides.

‘Tin prices are four times what they stood at when I took my uncle’s throne.’

Makin grinned. ‘Have I missed a guest? You’re speaking to somebody but it’s not me?’

‘That man of yours, Osser Gant? He would understand me.’ I let my armour lie where it fell. My eyes kept returning to the chessboard. They had set one for me on my last journey to Congression too. Every night. As if no one could pretend to the throne without being a player of the game.

‘You’ve led me to the water, but I can’t drink. Tell me plain, Jorg. I’m a simple man.’

‘Trade, Lord Makin.’ I pushed a pawn out experimentally. A ruby-eyed pawn, servant to the black queen. ‘We have no trade with the Isles, no tin, no woad, no Brettan nets, not those clever axes of theirs or those tough little sheep. We have no trade and black ships are seen off Conaught, sailing the Quiet Sea but never coming to port.’

‘There have been wars. The Brettan lords are always feuding.’ Makin shrugged.

‘Chella spoke of the Dead King. I don’t trust dreams but I trust the word of an enemy who thinks me wholly in their power. The marsh dead have kept my father’s armies busy on his borders. We would have had our reckoning years back, father and me, if he were not so tied with holding on to what he has.’

Makin nodded at that. ‘Kennick suffers too. All the men-at-arms who answer to me are set to keep the dead penned in the marshes. But an army of them? A king?’

‘Chella was a queen to the army she raised in the Cantanlona.’

‘But ships? Invasions?’

‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Makin, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ I sat on the bed and rotated the chessboard so the white queen and her army faced his way. ‘Make a move.’

Makin had six victories before I set him to snuffing out the lamps. That he took his six to the floor and I took my single win to the luxury of a bed proved scant comfort. I fell asleep with the pieces flashing before my eyes, black squares, white, the twinkle of rubies and emeralds.

A storm came in the night, raging against the canvas. Tents are boasters, telling exaggerated tales of the weather they save you from. The sound was of a deluge fit to drown the kingdom and a wind that could scour the rocks from mountain slopes. Under a weather blanket, curled below a hedge, it might not have woken me, but beneath the great drum of the pavilion roof I lay staring into darkness.

Sometimes it’s good to hear the rain, but not be wet, to know that the wind is howling but to feel no breath of it. I waited in that timeless comfortable dark and at last the scent of white musk rose, her arms folded about my chest, and she drew me down into dreams. There seemed an urgency to it tonight.

‘Aunt Katherine.’ No doubt my lips twitched toward the words while I slept.

In the beginning Katherine sent me only nightmares, as if she counted herself my conscience and needed to torment me with my crimes. Time and again baby Degran died in my hands and I woke screaming, sweat-soaked, a danger to any who shared my bed. I spent nights roasting over the slow fire of Sareth’s grief, shown from every angle by the arts her sister taught herself while married to the Prince of Arrow. Miana could not keep to my chambers and set herself a bed in the east tower.

Dream-sworn, I told myself. She’s a dream-witch. Sageous’s ilk. But it didn’t stop me wanting her. I painted Katherine’s image across the dark storm of my imagination. She never showed herself and so I brought forth my first sight of her, that time-locked memory when we collided in the corridors of the Tall Castle.

Katherine showed me her loved ones – those I had killed. Sir Galen championing her through the bright days of her youth in Scorron, and her maid Hanna at a time when she looked less sour and offered a child-princess comfort in a loveless court. In dreaming, Katherine made me care about her cares, about her people, twisting me with the strange logic of the sleeping mind such that they seemed important, real, as real as the memories from before the thorns. And all of this in the too-bright light of the Gelleth sun, the flesh-stripping glare of that Builder Sun, always behind me, throwing my shadow like a black finger into the midst of their lives.

I let her arms draw me down through midnight. I had never fought her, though I felt I could, and I think perhaps she wanted me to. Even more than she wanted to show me the wrongs I had wrought, even more than she needed to make me feel it as she felt it, I think she needed me to fight her, to struggle against her spell, to close my dreaming eyes and try to escape. But I didn’t. I told myself that I chose to face what I feared. That her torments would burn me clean of sentiment. But truly – I liked her arms around me, the feel of her close at hand, touching yet untouchable.

Whispers of light reached me through the starless night. Of late the dreams she drew me to were more confused, unfocused, as if she dreamed also. I would see her, or touch her, but never both. We would walk the Tall Castle, or the Palace of Arrow, her dresses flowing, silence binding us, the walls aging and crumbling as we passed. Or I would smell her, hold her, but be blind, or see only the graves of Perechaise.

Tonight though, the dream came cold and clear. Broken stone crunched beneath my shoes, the rain lashed me. I climbed a slope, bent against the gale. My fingers moved blind across natural rock, a wall rising before me. I knew every sensation but held no control as if I were a puppet and another kept the strings.

‘What lesson is this, Katherine?’

She never spoke to me. Just as I never fought her – she never spoke. At first the dreams she wrought on me were all anger and revenge. Still they often carried that edge but I thought also that she experimented, trained her talent – as a swordsman crafts his technique and adds new strokes to his repertoire. These had been Sageous’s skills and now that my aunt kept once more beneath Father’s roof it might be she filled the heathen’s role, though whether like him she spread a subtle web of influence and with touches turned the Hundred along Olidan Ancrath’s paths, or indeed her own, I didn’t know.

The storm fell away without warning and the wind died, though I heard it moaning behind me. A cave of some sort. I had passed through the narrow mouth of a cave. I crouched and swung the pack from my shoulder. Sure fingers found a flint and tinder. Within moments I lit the lantern fished from a pocket within the bag. I would have been proud of my work, but the hands that carried it out, the hands I held the flint in and struck flame with, were not mine. The lantern showed them to be pale, like flesh too long under water, and long-fingered. I have long fingers, but these were white spiders, crawling in the lantern’s shadows.

I moved on, or rather the man whose skin I shared moved on and bore me with him. The lantern’s glow reached out and found little to return it. My vision stayed where directed by the owner of the eyes I watched through – on the floor for the most part, natural rock smoothed by the passage of many feet. An occasional glance to the left and right showed waterfalls of frozen stone and unearthly galleries where stalagmites reached up to stalactites. And I knew where I walked. The Haunt’s eastern sally port. The pale man had climbed the Runyard in the dark of the storm and entered the sally port through the concealed slot high on the Runyard’s flank.

The man moved with confidence. Although many twists and turns led off to dark unknowns it took no special skill to find the way, polished as it was by countless predecessors. The dream seemed accurate, drawing on my memories to make substance. A shiver ran through me, though not through the pale man. If Katherine strove for accuracy then soon a black hand would close around the intruder, reaching from the shadow, and pull him with inexorable strength and merciful speed into the gaping maw of a troll. I hoped not to feel those black teeth close in my flesh, but it seemed likely. Already their stink hung in my nose and his collar chafed my neck.

He walked his path and no hand came reaching. If I had been able to hold a breath I would have let it sigh through my teeth. For a while the dream had convinced me I was there, but no; Gorgoth’s trolls guarded the subterranean paths to the Haunt and many more secret routes besides.

We came now through hand-hewn tunnels, gouged into the rock to join the Haunt to the natural caves. The man stopped, not far from the lowest of the Haunt’s cellars. Ahead a clot of darkness swallowed the lantern light and gave nothing back. For long moments he held still, no motion in him, almost inhuman in his lack of twitch or tremor. When he advanced he moved on swift feet, the hilt of a knife cool in his grip though I couldn’t see the blade. A single troll lay across the rough stone, sprawled out with its long limbs reaching. The beast’s face nestled, hidden against the black knob of its shoulder. It might have been dead, but with careful observation the pale man and I saw the slow rise and fall of its back as breath came and went.

Without haste the man stepped around the sleeping troll, ducking where the tunnel’s roof curved low, picking his way over black legs.

‘A poor dream, Katherine.’ I spoke without needing his lips. ‘Trolls are made for war. It’s written through them. This man’s scent would have woken a dozen by now and set their mouths running with hunger.’

My escort found the wooden door that gives onto the Haunt’s wine cellars. He worked the lock with heavy picks suited to such an old and solid mechanism. A drop of oil to take any squeak from the hinges and he pushed it open, stepping through without hesitation. I caught sight of his knife then, an assassin’s tool, long and thin, its handle of turned white bone.

He emerged from the false front of the huge barrel that disguised the exit. Propped against a real barrel, opposite the false one and of nearly equal size, a guardsman in my colours sat, helm to one side, legs stretched in front of him, head forward in slumber. I crouched before him. I felt my haunches settle on my heels, I felt the strain in the muscles of my thighs, the coarseness of the guard’s dirty blond hair as I pulled his head back. I knew him. The name fluttered behind my thoughts. Rodrick, a little fellow, younger than me, I once found him hiding in my tower when Arrow besieged the castle. My knife lay cold against his throat now, and still he didn’t stir. I’d half a mind to open his neck just for being such a useless guard. Even so it came as a shock when my hand slipped lower and drove the blade into his heart. That woke him! Rodrick watched me with hurt eyes, mouth twisting but silent, and he died. I waited. All trace of motion left the boy but still I waited. And then I pulled the knife free. Very little blood flowed. I wiped my blade clean on his tunic.

The pale man had black sleeves. I noticed that much before his gaze found the stairs and he went to them. He left his lantern beside Rodrick and his shadow led the way.

The man walked through the Haunt’s corridors and halls as if he belonged there. The castle lay in darkness with only the occasional lamp set to light a corner or doorway. Shutters rattled, shaken by the wind, rainwater pooled below, driven past lintels and running over stone floors. It seemed my people huddled in their beds while the storm howled, for none of them wandered, no servant tending lamps, no dun-man for the night-soil, not a nursemaid or guardsman’s harlot slipping from the barracks … not a guardsman come to that.

At last, as the assassin reached the internal door to the east tower, we found a guard who hadn’t abandoned his post. Sir Graeham, knight of my table, asleep on his feet, held upright by a combination of plate armour, a halberd, and the wall. Pale hands positioned the long knife at the gap between gorget and shoulderplate. The assassin set the heel of his palm over his knife’s bone hilt, positioned so a sharp blow would puncture both leather and chainmail, and find the jugular beneath. He paused, perhaps sharing my thought that the knight might create quite a clatter if he fell. We held, close enough that I could draw Sir Graeham’s ripe stink in with each breath. The wind howled and I drove the knife home. Its hilt stung the hand that wasn’t mine, the business end stung Sir Graeham worse, and he fell, twitching. His weight pulled him from the knife.

Again the assassin cleaned his blade. This time on the knight’s red cloak, smearing it with a brighter shade. Fastidious, this one.

He found the key on Graeham’s belt and unlocked the oak door, iron-bound and polished by the touch of hands. Old as the door was, the archway held more years. My uncle’s scrolls spoke of a time when the Haunt was nothing but the east tower, a single watchtower set on the mountain’s shoulder with a military camp about its base. And even those men, who fought the tribes of Or and forged a stronghold in the Highlands, did not build the tower. There is writing on that arch, but time has forgotten even the name of the script. Its meaning has passed beyond knowing.

The assassin stepped beneath the archway and beneath the runes deep-set upon the keystone. Pain shot through me, thorns found my flesh, hooking through skin and blood in a manner that promised no easy release, like the barbed arrow that must be dug free, or the lock-hound that needs killing before the muscles and tendons along its jaw can be sliced and its teeth pried from the bone. It hurt, but I found my freedom, torn from the body that had held me. He walked on without pause and I staggered in his wake, following as he mounted the stair. Across the back of his black cloak a cross had been sewn in white silk. A holy cross.

I ran at him, but passed through as if I were the ghost, though in truth it was me that shivered at the contact. Lamp light offered me his face as I turned, just for a moment before he walked through me and left me standing on the steps. The man held no colour, his face the same pale, drowned hue as his hands, hair oiled to the scalp, the iris of his eyes matching the ivory of the whites. He bore a cross embroidered in white silk across the front of his tunic to echo the one on his back. A papal assassin then. Only the Vatican sends assassins out into the world bearing a return address. The rest of us would rather not be caught using such agents. The papal assassin however is merely an extension of the Pope’s infallibility – how can there be shame in executing the word of God? Why would such men cloak themselves in anonymity?

Sprawled in an alcove off the stairwell, Brother Emmer lay dead to the world. The assassin knelt and applied his knife to make sure it was a permanent state of affairs. Emmer had shown little interest in women on the road and had seemed a good choice to watch over my queen. I watched the Pope’s man climb the stairs until the turn of the tower took him from view. Emmer’s blood washed down, step by step, in crimson falls.

I never fought Katherine, never tried to escape her illusions, but that didn’t mean I had to cooperate. Somehow I had broken free of the assassin and I had no reason to watch what else he might do. Murder my queen, no doubt. Miana would be sleeping in the chamber at the top of the stairs if Katherine kept to the castle plan she had mined from my memories. Should I follow like a fool and watch Miana’s throat slit? See her thrash in her blood with my child dying inside her?

I stood in the darkness with just the echoes of lamplight from beyond the winding of the stair above and below.

‘Truly? You think you can show me anything that would hurt me?’ I spoke to the air. ‘You’ve walked my rememberings.’ I let her wander where she pleased when she came with her nightmares. I thought perhaps that daring the long corridors of my memory was more torment to her than her punishments were to me. Even with the key to each of my doors in her hand I knew there were places in me she didn’t go. Who in their right mind would?

‘Let’s play this game, Princess, all the way through. Let’s discover if you find the end too bitter.’

I ran up the stairs, the contacts between foot and stone were light and without effort, as if only in the assassin’s flesh could I properly touch this dream. I caught him within moments, passed him and won the race to the top.

Marten waited there, crouched before the queen’s door, his sword and shield on the floor, his eyes bloodshot and wild. Sweat held dark hair to his brow and ran down the straining tendons of his neck. In one fist a dagger, making constant jabs into his open palm. His breath came in short gasps and blood brimmed crimson from the cup of his hand.

‘Fight it,’ I told him. Despite my resolve I found myself drawn in by his struggle to stay awake and guard Miana.

The assassin came into view, my view, not Marten’s. He stopped, sniffed the air without sound, and cocked his head to catch the faint gasp of Marten’s pain. Whilst he paused I dived into him, determined to settle around his bones, clinging to anything tangible. A moment of blind agony and I stared once more out of his eyes. I tasted blood. He had shared the hurt of reunion with me and although he hadn’t cried out, a sharp intake of breath had passed his lips. Perhaps it would be enough to warn Marten.

The Pope’s man reached into his robe, replacing the long bone-handled blade and drawing forth two short and heavy daggers, cruciform and weighted for throwing. He moved very fast, diving into Marten’s line of sight whilst at the same time releasing the first of his knives, just a flick of the wrist but imparting lethal force.

Marten launched himself almost in the instant we faced him, slowed for a heartbeat perhaps by the weight of sleep he denied. The assassin’s dagger hit somewhere between neck and belly – I heard chain links snap. He passed us with a roar and the assassin’s foot lashed out, catching Marten’s chin, propelling him into the curved wall. Momentum carried him feet over head over feet, clattering down the stairs. We hesitated, as if unsure whether to pursue and check if any bones remained unbroken. The hot wetness below our knee convinced the assassin otherwise. Somehow Marten had sliced the assassin as he passed. The Pope’s man hobbled on toward the door, hissing at the pain now spreading from the cut Marten had left on us. He paused to tie a bandage, a silk sash from an inner pocket, pulled it tight, then advanced up the steps.

Any key had clattered down the stairs with Marten and the Pope’s man took out his picks once more to work the lock. It took longer than before, the queen’s door boasted a tricky mechanism perhaps as old as the tower. Before it yielded to our patient work the flagstones were pooled with the assassin’s blood, red as any man’s despite the pallor of his skin.

We stood, and I felt his weakness – blood loss and something else – he strained some muscle I didn’t share, but I knew the effort wearied him. Perhaps the all-encompassing sleep had cost him dear.

The door opened without sound. He took the lamp from its hook where Marten had crouched and stepped in. The strength of his imaginings began to reach me as at last his excitement mounted. I saw the pictures rising in his mind. All of a sudden, dream or no dream, I wanted him to fail. I didn’t want him to slice Miana open. I had no wish to see the red ruin of my unborn child drawn from her. The fear surprised me, raw and basic, and I knew it to be my own, not some sharing with Katherine. I wondered if it might be an echo of what Coddin warned I would feel for my son or daughter when I first saw them, held them. If that were true then I had my first inkling of how dangerous the bond might be.

On the dresser by the bed a glimmer from the silver chain I gave Miana on her name day. Under the covers a mounded form caught in shadows, wife and child, soft in sleep.

‘Wake up.’ As if saying it would make it happen. ‘Wake up.’ All my will and not even a tremble of it on his lips.

Cold certainty gripped me by the throat. This was real. This was now. I slept in my bed in a tent, Miana slept in hers miles from me, and a pale death approached her.

‘Katherine!’ I shouted her name inside his head. ‘Don’t do this!’

He stepped toward the bed, the second of his throwing knives raised and ready. Perhaps only the size of the lump beneath the covers prevented him from flinging the blade at it immediately. Miana could not be said to be a large woman, even with a baby straining to get out of her. It looked as though she had company in there. I might even have thought it, but for Marten at the door.

Another step, his injured leg numb and cold now, his lips muttering some spell in silence, as if his magics mirrored his unsteady gait and needed support. I had no warning, my arm – his arm – drew back to throw. In that moment the covers fluttered, I heard a muted ‘choom’ and a fist hit my side, hard enough to throw me back, spinning twice before slamming into the wall. I slid to the floor, legs stretched before me and looked down. Both pale hands covered my side, blood spurting between my fingers, pieces of flesh hanging.

The covers lifted and Miana faced me, crouched around the black mass of the Nuban’s crossbow, eyes wide and fierce above it.

My right hand found the bone handle of the longer knife. Spitting blood I crawled to my feet, the world rotating around me. I could see that no bolts remained in the crossbow. Inside the assassin I strained with every piece of my being to still his legs, to lay down the weapon. I think he felt it this time. He moved slowly, but keeping between Miana and her door. His eyes fell to her belly, taut beneath her nightgown.

‘Stop!’ I held to his arm with all my will, but still it crept forward.

Miana looked angry rather than scared. Ready to do bloody murder.

My hand started forward, lunging with the knife, aimed low, below the swing of Miana’s bow. I couldn’t stop it. The gleaming blade would pierce her womb, and slice, and in a welter of gore she would die. Our child with her.

The assassin thrust, and a hand span from finding flesh our arm shuddered off course, all its power cut clean away by a blow that sheared through my shoulder. I twisted as I collapsed, the ironwork of the crossbow smashing into my face. Marten stood behind me, a devil clothed in blood, his snarl veiled in scarlet. My head hit the carpet, vision turning black. Their voices sounded far away.

‘My queen!’

‘I’m not hurt, Marten.’

‘I’m so sorry – I failed you – he passed me.’

‘I’m not hurt, Marten … A woman woke me in my dreams.’

3

‘You’re quiet this morning, Jorg.’

I crunched my bread: from the Haunt, a day old and slightly stale.

‘Still brooding over the chess?’ The smell of clove-spice as he came close. ‘I told you I’ve played since I was six.’

The bread snapped and scattered crust as I broke it open. ‘Get Riccard in here will you?’

Makin stood, downing his java, a cold and stinking brew the guards favour. He left without question: Makin could read people.

Riccard followed him back in moments later, tramping mud over the floor hides, crumbs of his own breakfast in his yellow moustache.

‘Sire?’ He offered a bow, probably warned by Makin.

‘I want you to ride to the Haunt. Take an hour there. Speak to Chancellor Coddin and the queen. Catch us up as soon as you can with any report. If that report makes mention of a white-skinned man, bring the black coffer from my treasury, the one whose lid is inlaid with a silver eagle, and ten men to guard it. Coddin will arrange it.’

Makin raised an eyebrow but came no closer to a question.

I pulled the chessboard near and took an apple from the table. The apple sprayed when bitten and droplets of juice shone on the black and white squares. The pieces stood ready in their lines. I set a finger to the white queen, making a slow circle so she rolled around her base. Either it had been a false dream, Katherine designing better torments than of old, and Miana was fine, or it had been a true dream and Miana was fine.

‘Another game, Jorg?’ Makin asked. All around, from outside, the sounds of camp being struck.

‘No.’ The queen fell, toppling two pawns. ‘I’m past games.’

4

Five years earlier

I took the Haunt and the Highland’s crown in my fourteenth year and bore its weight three months before I went once more to the road. I ranged north to the Heimrift and south to the Horse Coast, and approached fifteen in the Castle Morrow under the protection of Earl Hansa, my grandfather. And though it was his heavy horse that had drawn me there, and the promise of a strong ally in the Southlands, it was the secrets which lay beneath the castle that kept me. In a forgotten cellar one small corner of a lost world broke through into ours.

‘Come out come out wherever you are.’ I knocked the hilt of my dagger against the machine. In the cramped cellar it rang loud enough to hurt my ears.

Still nothing. Just the flicker and buzz of the three still-working glow-bulbs overhead.

‘Come on, Grouch. You pop out to badger every visitor. You’re famed for it. And yet you hide from me?’

I tapped metal to metal. A thoughtful tempo. Why would Fexler Brews hide from me?

‘I thought I was your favourite?’ I turned the Builders’ view-ring over in my hand. He hadn’t made me work very hard for it and I counted it a gift above any my father had ever given me.

‘It’s some kind of test?’ I asked. ‘You want something from me?’

What would a Builder ghost want from me? What couldn’t he take, or make? Or ask for? If he wanted something, wouldn’t he ask?

‘You want something.’

One of the glow-bulbs flickered, flared, and died.

He needs something from me but can’t ask.

I held the view-ring to my eye, and once again I saw the world – the whole world as viewed from outside, a jewel of blue and white hung in the blackness that holds the stars.

He wanted me to see something.

‘Where are you, Fexler? Where are you hiding?’

I moved to pull the view-ring away in disgust when a tiny point of light caught my eye. A single red dot in all that swirling blue. I pushed the ring tight against the bones of brow and cheek. ‘Where are you?’ And dialled the side of the ring so the world grew beneath me as though I fell into it. I steered and dialled, homing in on my prey, a constant red dot, drawing me to it now, faster and faster until the ring could show no more and the dot held steady above a barren hill in a range that stretched across badlands to the west of the Horse Coast.

‘You want me to go here?’ I asked.

Silence. Another glow-bulb flared and died.

I stood a moment in the trembling light of the last glow-bulb, shrugged and made my way up the narrow spiral of stairs toward the castle above.

My grandfather’s map room is in a tall tower that overlooks the sea. The map scrolls are held in oiled leather tubes, a wax seal on each set with his sigil. Seven narrow windows admit the light, at least in the months when the storm shutters are not closed against the elements. A scribe is employed to tend the place, and spends his days there from dawn to dusk, ready to open the tubes for anyone authorized to view the contents, and to seal them away again when the work is done.

‘You’ve never thought to suggest a different room?’ I asked the scribe as the wind tried to steal the map for the twentieth time. I had been there an hour, chasing documents across the chamber, and was ready to commit murder. How Redmon hadn’t taken a crossbow and opened up on the folk below through his seven windows I didn’t know. I caught the map before it left the table and replaced the four paperweights it had shrugged off.

‘Good ventilation is essential for preserving the vellum,’ Redmon said. He kept his gaze on his feet, his quill turning over and over in his hand. I think he worried I might damage his charges in my temper. Had he known me he would have worried about his own health. He looked narrow enough to fit through one of the windows.

I located the hills I had seen through the view-ring, and found the general area of the particular hill where the red dot had sat so patiently. I had wondered if there might truly be a red light blazing on that hillside, so bright it could be seen from the dark vaults of heaven, but I reasoned that it had grown no brighter as my view closed in upon it and so it must have been some clever artifice, like a wax mark on a looking glass that seems to override your reflection.

‘And what does this signify?’ I asked, my finger on a symbol that covered the region. I felt pretty sure I knew. There were three similar symbols marked on the maps of Ancrath in my father’s library, covering the regions of Ill Shadow, Eastern Dark, and Kane’s Scar. But perhaps they served a different purpose in the southlands.

Redmon stepped to the desk and leaned in. ‘Promised regions.’

‘Promised?’ I asked.

‘The half-life lands. Not a place to travel.’

The symbols served the same purpose as they did in Ancrath. They warned of taints lingering from the Builders’ war, stains from their poisons, or shadows from the day of a thousand suns.

‘And the promise?’ I asked.

‘Noble Chen’s promise, of course.’ He looked surprised. ‘That when the half-life has spent itself these lands will be returned to man, to till and plough.’ Redmon pushed the wire-framed reading lenses further up his nose and returned to his ledgers at the big desk before the towering shelves of pigeonholes, each crammed with documents.

I rolled the scroll up and took it in my hand like a baton. ‘I’m taking this to show Lord Robert.’

Redmon watched with anguish as I left, as if I’d stolen his only son to use as target practice. ‘I’ll look after it,’ I said.

I found my uncle in the stables. He spent more time there than anywhere else, and since I’d met his shrew of a wife I had come to understand. Horses made her sneeze I heard it told, worse and worse minute by minute, until it seemed she would sneeze the eyes from her head. Robert found his peace amongst the stalls, talking bloodlines with his stable-master and looking over his stock. He had thirty horses in the castle stables, all prime examples of their lines, and his best knights to ride them, cavalrymen billeted away from the house guard and wall guard in far more luxury, as befits men of title.

‘What do you know of the Iberico?’ I called out as I walked toward him between the stalls.

‘And good afternoon to you, young Jorg.’ He shook his head and patted the neck of the black stallion leaning out at him.

‘I need to go there,’ I said.

He shook his head with emphasis this time. ‘The Iberico are dead land. Promised but not given. You don’t want to go there.’

‘That’s true. I don’t want to. But I need to go there. So what can you tell me?’ I asked.

The stallion snorted and rolled an eye as if venting Robert’s frustration for him.

‘I can tell you that men who spend time in such places sicken and die. Some take years before the poison eats them from within, others last weeks or days, losing their hair and teeth, vomiting blood.’

‘I will be quick then.’ Behind the set of my jaw second thoughts tried to wrest control of my tongue.

‘There are places in the Iberico Hills, unmarked save for the barren look of them, where a man’s skin will fall from him as he walks.’ My uncle pushed the horse away and stepped closer to me. ‘What grows in those hills is twisted, what lives there unnatural. I doubt your need exceeds the risks.’

‘You’re right,’ I said. And he was. But when was the world ever so simple as right and wrong? I blinked twice and the red dot watched me from the darkness behind my eyelids. ‘I know you’re right, but often it’s not in me to take the sensible path, Uncle. I’m an explorer. Maybe that itch is in you too?’

He rubbed his beard, a quick grin showing through the worry. ‘Explore somewhere else?’

‘I should take my foolish risks while I’m young, no? Better now than when that little girl you’ve found for me is grown and looking to me to keep her in silks and splendour. If my mistakes prove fatal, find her another husband.’

‘This is nothing to do with Miana. You just shouldn’t do this, Jorg. If I thought it would stop you I would tell you “no” and set a guard to watch you.’

I bowed, turned, and walked away. ‘I’ll take a mule. No sense risking good horseflesh.’

‘On that we’re agreed,’ he called after me. ‘Don’t let it drink from any standing water there.’

I stepped back into the brightness of the day. The wind still raked across the courtyard, cold from the sea, but the sun would burn you even so.

‘Visit Carrod Springs first!’ Robert’s shout reached me as I started for my quarters.

‘Qalasadi and Ibn Fayed.’ The names tasted exotic.

‘A man of power and a powerful man.’ My grandfather rested in the chair where the Earls of Morrow had sat for generations, facing the sea.

A circle of Builder glass, stronger than the walls around it and a full three yards in diameter, showed us the Middle Sea, the curvature of the Earth making it an azure infinity, white-flecked with waves. Out beyond sight across those depths, across the Corsair Isle, no further from us than Crath City, lay Roma and all her dominions.

Caliph Ibn Fayed might keep his court in the heart of a desert but his ships reached out across that sea, Moorish hands seeking to reclaim these lands that had been passed back and forth between Christendom and the Moslems since forever. Ibn Fayed’s mathmagician, Qalasadi, had likely returned to the shadow of the caliph’s throne to calculate the optimal timing for the next strike, and the odds of its success.

Far below us a wave slapped the cliffs, no tremor of it reaching the room but a high spray beading the glass. Twice a day they lowered a stable-boy with bucket and cloth to ensure that nothing but age dimmed Grandfather’s view.

‘Four sails,’ he said.

I had only seen three. The merchant cog, red-hulled, hauling cargo along the coast, and two fishing boats, bobbing further out.

Grandfather saw my frown. ‘Out there, on the horizon.’ A soft-voiced man despite the creaks of age.

A white flash. The sails of some wide-ranging vessel. A warship? A pirate cutter from the Isle? Or some flat-bellied scow out of Ægypt, treasure-laden?

I went closer to the glass, pressed a hand to its coldness. How many centuries ago had it been looted and from what ruin? Redmon surely had a scroll in his windy tower that held the secret.

‘I can’t allow them to live,’ I said. The caliph was just a name to me, Qalasadi filled my thoughts. The numbered man.

Grandfather laughed in his chair, the whale-ivory back of it spreading above him like the spray of a breaking wave. ‘Would you hunt down every man who wronged you, Jorg? However far-flung? However long they run? Seems to me a man like that is a slave to chance, always hunting, no time for living.’

‘They would have seen you die screaming while the poison ate you,’ I said. ‘Your wife too. Your son.’

‘And would have had you take the blame.’ He yawned wide enough to crack his jaw and ran the heels of both palms across the grey stubble of his beard.

‘Poison is a dirty weapon,’ I said. Not that I had been above its use in Gelleth. I maintain a balanced view of the world, but that balance is always in my favour.

‘We play a dirty game.’ Grandfather nodded and watched me from his wrinkles with those dark eyes so like Mother’s.

Perhaps it wasn’t the poison that irked me. Or setting me up for the fall – a chance inspiration surely and none of Ibn Fayed’s doing. I recalled Qalasadi in that courtyard the only time we met, his assessment, his calculation as he considered the probabilities. Maybe that lack of malice had made it so personal; he reduced me to numbers and played the odds. Fexler’s ghost had been constructed by reducing the true man to numbers. I found I didn’t like the process.

‘They struck at my family,’ I said, and shrugged. ‘I’ve built a kingdom on not allowing such acts to go unpunished.’

He watched me then, with the sunlight streaming around me from the sea window, making me a shadow cut from light. What went on beneath that thin circlet of gold, I wondered, what calculations? We all make them. Not so cold-blooded as Qalasadi’s but an arithmetic of sorts nonetheless. What did he make of me, this watering-down of his seed, beloved daughter mixed with detestable Ancrath? Nothing but a name to him a month ago. No child to remember, no soft toddling innocence from years past to blunt the sharp angles of the young killer before him – blood of his blood.

‘How would you do it? The Caliph of Liba lives in lands that are not like ours. You would be a white man where almost no white men are. A stranger in a strange land. Marked at every turn. Reported from the moment you set foot on the Afrique shores. You’ll find no friends there, only sand, disease, and death. I would gladly have Ibn Fayed and Qalasadi die. Fayed for striking at me in my halls, the mathmagician for his treachery. But if a lone assassin, especially a lone white assassin, could have accomplished it I would have dispatched one. Not in answer to Fayed’s raids – as a man of honour I meet war with war – but in response to his assassin.’

All men of ambition must pray to be pitted against men of honour. Although I pitied my grandfather at that moment, also it made me happy to know that at least somewhere in the mix from which I sprung there lurked a dash of such a man.

‘You’re right to say it would not be easy, Earl Hansa.’ I bowed. ‘Maybe I’ll wait until it becomes easy … certainly I need to learn more, consider more.’

Grandfather came to a decision. I saw the change as his face hardened into it. He would make a terrible player of poker.

‘Leave Ibn Fayed and his creatures to me, Jorg. They struck at Morrow, at me and mine in the Castle Morrow. The vengeance is mine to take and I will take it.’

The old man had weighed his odds. In one hand the life of an unknown relative, tainted by bad blood, in the other the chance of destroying an enemy. Whether ‘unknown relative’ had grown into ‘Rowan’s son, my daughter’s child’ and outweighed the gain, or whether he judged my chances of success so feather-light as to be outweighed by any claim on kinship, I didn’t know.

‘I will leave them, then.’ I bowed again. The lie came easily. I chose to believe he saw me as his daughter’s son.

I provisioned well, loading my mule with water-skins and dried meat. I would find fruit on the way: on the Horse Coast in high summer you had only to stretch out an arm to find an apple, apricot, plum, peach, pear, or even an orange. I packed a tent, for shade is a rarity in the dry hills behind the coastlands, and without the sea breezes the land bakes. I’m told the Moors have held the southern kingdoms time and again, Kadiz, Kordoba, Morrow, Wennith, Andaluth, even Aramis. They find it not so different from the dusts of Afrique.

‘So the Iberico, is it?’

I finished cinching the load-strap beneath my mule and looked up.

‘Sunny!’ I grinned at his scowl. Months back I chose the name for the guardsman after he did his best to keep me out of the castle that first day when I arrived incognito.

‘Minding my own business I was and up comes Earl Hansa. “Greyson,” he says. He likes to know all the men’s names. “Greyson,” he says, and puts his hand on my shoulder. “Young King Jorg is making a trip and I’d like you to go along with him.” “Volunteering”, he called it.’

‘Sunny, I can’t think of a man I’d rather have with me.’ I stood and patted the mule’s haunches. It seemed a sturdy beast, shabby but strong. The ostler said he was forty years and more, and wise with it. I thought it good to have at least one greybeard in the party.

‘This is revenge for making you drink from the horse trough, ain’t it?’ Sunny said. He had a sour look to him that made me think of Brother Row.

I waggled my hand. ‘Little bit.’ In truth I hadn’t known I was getting an escort, let alone picked the man. ‘In any case, you’ll enjoy getting out and about,’ I said. ‘Surely even the Iberico Hills beat a day standing guard at the Lowery Gate?’

He spat at that, strengthening his resemblance to Row still further. ‘I’m a wall guard, not a house flower.’ A stretch of his arm showed off the sun’s nut-brown stain. House guards are never so tanned.

With the mule’s tether in hand I set off for the gate. Sunny followed. His packhorse stood outside the castle wall in the shade of an olive tree, high laden as if we were bound for a crossing of the Aups.

However reluctant the show Sunny put on, my mule had him beaten. I had to haul the beast past the horse trough. I named him Balky and encouraged him with a stick. In the end I had my way, but the fact that Balky did not want to go where I led was never in doubt. I guess he really was the wise one after all.

5

Five years earlier

Castle Morrow, like the Haunt, is set apart from the region’s main town. Both castles are placed for defence of their occupants. In the Hundred War the conquering of kingdoms is the business of avarice. The Hundred want their new lands to be rich and plentiful, full of taxpayers and recruits. Most attacks will aim to kill the land’s ruler so the aggressor may claim his throne and take the kingdom unharmed. Wars of attrition where the peasantry are slaughtered, cities burned, crops destroyed, are less common and happen most often when the two sides are evenly matched, both struggling to gain the advantage required to assault the foe’s castles.

The city of Albaseat rests on fertile plains maybe fifty miles inland from Castle Morrow. It took Sunny and me three days to walk the distance, having started late on the first day, and pausing for frequent stick-based negotiations with Balky. The River Jucca feeds the surrounding farmlands. We approached the city along the Coast Road, which for the last few miles leads along the riverbank, past orchards of every sort, through vineyards, along the foot of slopes thick with olive groves. Turning for Albaseat’s gates we walked between tilled fields heavy with tomatoes, peppers, beans, onions, cabbage, potatoes, enough food to feed the world.

The walls and towers of Albaseat shone in the southern sun.

‘Makes Hodd Town look like a pile of offal,’ I said.

‘Where?’ Sunny asked.

‘Capital city of the Renar Highlands,’ I said. ‘The only city really. More of a big town. Well a town anyhow.’

‘The Renar Highlands?’

‘Now you’re just trying to irk me.’ I didn’t think he was, though. He blinked and looked away from Albaseat’s towers.

‘Oh that Hood Town, my apologies.’ It wasn’t often that Sunny remembered I was the king of anywhere and it always left him looking surprised.

‘Hodd Town!’

The guards at the city gates let us pass without question. It wasn’t often that I remembered Sunny was Greyson Landless, royal guard from Earl Hansa’s court.

Albaseat not only left Hodd Town looking like a tumbledown village, it made Crath City look shabby in comparison. The Moors had ruled Albaseat for generations and left their mark everywhere, from the great stone halls that stabled grandfather’s cavalry to the high towers from whose minarets you could look out over the source of his wealth, laid out in many shades of green. I did just that, paying a copper to climb the winding stair of the Fayed Tower, a public building at the heart of the great plaza before the new cathedral. Sunny stayed at ground level, watching his horse and Balky from the tower’s shade.

Even a hundred yards above the plaza’s baking flagstones it felt oven hot. The breeze through the minaret was worth a copper on its own. Without the slow green waters of the Jucca the fields would be desert. The green gave over to parched browns as the land rose and I could see the first rolling steps of the Iberico Hills away to the north. Whatever taint they carried seemed to stain the air itself, turning it a dirty yellow where the horizon started to reclaim the hills.

I leaned out, hands on the windowsill, to spot Sunny below. The city marched off in all directions, broad and ordered streets lined with tall, whitewashed houses. To the west grander mansions, to the east the low homes and tight alleys of the poor. My grandfather’s people living in the peace of his reign, his nobles plotting, merchants trading, blacksmith, tanner, and slaughterman hard at work, whores aback, maids aknee, washerwomen hauling loads to the river-side meadows where horsemen trained their steeds, the pulse of life, an old and complex dance of many partners. Quick, quick, slow.

To leave all this behind and dare old poisons, to risk an end like those I had given the people of Gelleth, made no sense. And still I would do it. Not for the hollowness inside me, nor the weight of the copper box that held what had been taken, not for the promise of old magics and the power they offered, but just to know, just to do more than skitter about on the surface of this world. I wanted more than I could see from a tower, however high, or even from the eyes the Builders set among the stars.

Perhaps I just wanted to know what it was that I wanted. Maybe that is all that growing up means.

Slow steps brought me from the tower, lost in thought. I waved Sunny to me and bid him lead me to the Lord House.

‘They won’t want the likes of—’ He glanced back at me, taking in the fine cloak, the silver-chased breastplate. ‘Oh.’ And remembering that I was a king, albeit of a realm he hardly knew of, he led on.

We passed the cathedral, the finest I’d seen, a stone confection reaching for blue skies. The saints watched me from their niches and galleries. I felt their disapproval, as if they turned to stare once we passed. The crowds thronged there, before the cathedral steps, perhaps drawn by the cool promise of the great hall within. Sunny and I elbowed our way through, pushing aside the occasional priest and monk as we went.

I came sweating to the doors of the Lord House. I would have stripped to the waist and let Balky carry my gear but perhaps that might have created a poor impression. The guards admitted us, a boy taking our animals, and we sat on velvet-cushioned chairs whilst a flunky in foolish amounts of lace and silk went to announce our arrival to the provost.

The man returned several minutes later with a polite cough to indicate that I might put down the large ornamental vase I had been studying and follow him. When my hands are idle they find mischief of one sort or other. I let the vase slip, caught it an inch from the floor and set it down. Polite coughs leave me wanting to choke out a cough of a different sort. I left Sunny to return the ornament to its niche and bade the servant lead on.

A short corridor took us to the doors of the reception chamber. Like the foyer, every inch of it stood tiled in geometric patterns, blue and white and black, fiendishly complex. Qalasadi would have enjoyed it: even a mathmagician would be hard-pressed to tease out all the secrets it held. High windows caught what breeze was to be had and gave a relief from the heat of the day.

The flunky knocked three times with a little rod he seemed to carry for that sole purpose. A pause and we entered.

The room beyond took my breath, complex in detail but a sparse and simple beauty on the grand scale, an architecture of numbers, very different from the gothic halls of my lands or the dull boxes the Builders left us. The provost sat at the far end in a high-backed ebony chair. Apart from two guards at the door and a scribe at a small desk beside the provost’s seat, the long chamber lay empty and my footsteps echoed as I approached.

She looked up from her scroll while I closed the last few yards, a hunched old woman with black and glittering eyes, reminding me of a crow gone to grey and tatters.

‘Honorous Jorg Ancrath, King of the Renar Highlands. Grandson to Earl Hansa.’ She introduced me to herself.

I gave her the small fraction of a bow her rank commanded and answered in the local custom. ‘You have the right of it, madam.’

‘We’re honoured to welcome you to Albaseat, King Jorg,’ she said through thin, dry lips and the scribe scratched the words across his parchment.

‘It’s a fine city. If I could carry it I’d take it with me.’

Again the scratching of the quill – my words falling so quickly into posterity.

‘What are your plans, King Jorg? I hope we can tempt you to stay? Two days would be sufficient to prepare an official banquet in your honour. Many of the region’s merchants would fight for the opportunity to bend your ear, and our nobility would compete to host you at their mansions, even though I hear you are already promised to Miana of Wennith. And of course Cardinal Hencom will require you at mass.’

I took pleasure in not waiting for the scribe to catch up, but resisted the temptation to pepper my reply with rare and difficult words or random noises for him to puzzle over.

‘Perhaps on my return, Provost. I plan first to visit the Iberico Hills. I have an interest in the promised lands: my father’s kingdom has several regions where the fire from the thousand suns still burns.’

I heard the quill falter at that. The old woman, though, did not flinch.

‘The fire that burns the promised lands is unseen and gives no heat, King Jorg, but it sears flesh just the same. Better to learn of such places in the library.’

She made no talk of postponing my trip until after her nobles and merchants had taken their bites of me. If I were bound for the Iberico Hills such efforts would wasted – money thrown into the grave as the local saying had it.

‘Libraries are a good place to start journeys, Provost. In fact I have come to you hoping that Albaseat might have in one of its libraries a better map of the Iberico than the one copied from my grandfather’s scrolls. I would count it a great favour if such a map were provided to me …’

I wondered how I looked to her, how young in my armour and confidence. From a distance the gaps between things are reduced. From the far end of her tunnel of years I wondered how different I looked from a child, from a toddler daring a high fall with not the slightest understanding of consequence.

‘I would advise beginning and ending this journey among the scrolls, King Jorg.’ She shifted in her chair, plagued no doubt by the aching of joints. ‘But when age speaks to youth it goes unheard. When do you plan to leave?’

‘With the dawn, Provost.’

‘I will set my scribe to searching for a map and have whatever he finds waiting for you at the North Gate by first light.’

‘My thanks.’ I inclined my head. ‘I hope to have some new tales to tell at your banquet when I return.’

She dismissed me with an impatient wave. She didn’t expect to see me again.

6

Five years earlier

Sunny and I made our way to the North Gate of Albaseat in the grey light that steals over the world before dawn. The streets thronged. In summer the Horse Coast bakes and only the earliest hours of the day offer respite. By noon the locals would retreat behind white walls, beneath the terracotta tiles, and sleep until the sun slipped from its zenith.

In the lanes leading to the gate and the wide plaza that lay before it, business had already started. Tavern doors stood open while men bore kegs in upon their shoulders, or lowered barrels into the cellars by the street-traps. Grey-faced women emptied slops from buckets into the gutters. We passed a smithy open to the road so that passersby could see the hammering and quenching and be tempted to purchase what took such sweat and force to craft. A lad hunched at the forge, poking life back into fires banked overnight.

‘Oh, to be still abed.’ Sunny yanked his packhorse away from some tempting refuse.

A cry turned us back toward the blacksmith’s. We had gone only a dozen steps beyond it. The smith’s boy lay in the street now. He pushed himself up from the flagstones, face grazed, shaking his head, unsteady. The smith paced out from his workshop and kicked the boy hard enough to lift him off the ground. The air left his lungs with a whuff. Under the dirt the boy’s hair looked fair, almost golden, rare this far south.

‘My money’s on the big fellow,’ I said. My brother Will had such hair.

‘He’s a big one, all right.’ Sunny nodded. The smith wore just a leather apron from shoulder to knee and leggings held up with rope. The muscle in his arms gleamed. Swinging a four-pound hammer from dawn till dusk will put a lot of meat on a man.

The child lay on his back, one arm half-raised, too winded to groan, a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth. I thought he might be eight, maybe nine.

‘Do I have to kick every lesson into you?’ The smith didn’t yell but he had the voice of a man who speaks over the anvil. He drove his foot into the boy’s head, the force rolling him once. Blood on the smith’s boot now, and staining the boy’s hair.

‘Ah, hell.’ Sunny shook his head.

We watched as the smith stepped in closer.

‘I should stop this,’ Sunny said, reluctance in every line of him. Something in the smith’s face put me in mind of Rike. Not a man to get in the way of.

‘Boys get kicked every day,’ I said. ‘Children die every day.’ Some have their heads broken against milestones.

The smith loomed above the boy, who lay curled now as if hunched against the pain. The man drew back for another kick, then paused, reaching a decision. He lifted his boot to stamp the life out of the lad. I guessed he thought him past use, best to finish him off.

‘They don’t die every day with one of Earl Hansa’s guards watching. The Earl wouldn’t want this.’ But still Sunny didn’t move. Instead he shouted. ‘You, smith, stop!’

The man paused, his heel a few inches above the side of the boy’s head.

‘I’ve picked up strays before and they both died,’ I said past a bitter taste. I saw blood in golden curls and felt the thorns’ tight hold. I learned this lesson young, a sharp lesson taught in blood and rain. The path to the empire gates lay at my back. A man diverted from that path by strays, burdened by others’ needs, would never sit upon the all-throne. Orrin of Arrow would save the children, but they would not save him.

‘He’s a street cur,’ the smith said. ‘Too stupid to learn. I’ve fed him for a month. Kept him under my roof. He’s mine to end.’ He brought his heel down hard, his weight upon it.

A loud retort of leather on stone. The boy rolled clear but lacked the strength to get up. The smith roared a curse – it drowned my own – the burn that stretched across my face from chin to brow as if a red-hot hand had branded me, now burned again with the same pain that it first gave. I’ve been told that conscience speaks in a small voice at the back of the mind, clear to some, to others muffled and easy to ignore. I never heard that it burned across a man’s face in red agony. Still, pain or no pain, I don’t like to be led or to be pushed. Perhaps I selected Balky as a kindred spirit for I took direction as poorly, even from my own conscience on the rare occasions it made a bid for control.

Sunny passed me, aimed for the smith. He hadn’t even drawn his sword.

‘I’ll buy him from you!’ I shouted. Sunny could come in handy and I guessed the smith would break his arms off before the idiot thought to reach for his blade.

That made the smith stop in his tracks, Sunny too, with a sigh of relief, and it quieted the pain. The smith eyed the silver on my breastplate, the cut of my cloak, and thought perhaps that his satisfaction might be worth less than the contents of my coin pouch.

‘What’s your offer?’

‘A contest of your choosing. You win and I pay you this for the boy.’ I held a gold ducet before my face between index and middle finger. ‘Lose and you get nothing for him.’ I magicked the coin away.

He had a good frown at that. The boy managed another roll and fetched up against the wall of the harness shop opposite.

‘Perhaps you think you can hold a hot iron longer than I can?’ I suggested.

The frown deepened into crevasses topped by the black band of his brows. ‘Strength,’ he said. ‘Who can hold the anvil overhead the longest.’

I glanced at the anvil a few yards back into the smithy. Perhaps two men of regular height might weigh as much. ‘Rules?’ I asked.

‘Rules? No rules!’ He laughed. He flexed an arm and muscle mounded on muscle. The Great Ronaldo would be impressed if Taproot’s circus ever made it to Albaseat. ‘Strength! That’s the rule.’

‘Show me how it’s done, then.’ I walked into the smithy. The glow of the forge fire and of two smoking lamps gave enough light to avoid the workbenches and various buckets. The place had a pleasing smell of char and iron and sweat. It reminded me of Norwood, of Mabberton, of a dozen other battles.

The smith followed. I set a hand to his chest as he passed me. ‘Your name?’

‘Jonas.’

He walked around the anvil. I glanced at the ceiling where tools hung from the beams. He would have just enough room. I would have plenty as he stood a hand taller than me.

Sunny stepped up behind me.

‘The boy’s still alive, I take it? I’m not doing this for a corpse.’

‘He’s alive. Might be hurt bad.’

Jonas crouched beside the anvil. He closed one big hand around the horn and set the heel of his other hand beneath the lip of the anvil’s face.

‘You’ve done this before.’ I gave him my grin.

‘Yes.’ He showed his teeth. ‘I can taste your gold already, boy.’

He tensed, building for the explosion that would drive the ironwork upward. That’s when I hit him, with a hammer from the nearest bench. I struck the side of his head just by the eye. The noise wasn’t dissimilar from his boot hitting the child. The hammer came away bloody and Jonas pitched forward over his anvil.

‘What?’ Sunny asked, as if somehow he hadn’t seen it in the half-light.

I shrugged. ‘No rules. You heard him.’

We left them both lying in their blood. Whatever fire ate at my face I didn’t need another stray, and even if the boy could walk, taking him to the Iberico would be more cruel than another month in Jonas’s care. At least the boy was sitting up and looking about, which was more than could be said for his master.

A corner and another street brought us to the plaza. We pushed a path through bakers’ boys with trays of loaves overhead, between laden farm carts ready to be offloaded onto the stalls already set to either side of the gate towers. The place heaved, late arriving traders made haste to erect their tables and awnings, and the townsfolk came mob-handed to buy, coins clicking in their hip pouches, eyes darting, hunting bargains in the predawn grey.

‘We’ll be lucky to find the provost’s man in all this.’ Sunny snatched at a passing bread roll and missed.

‘Have some faith, man,’ I said. ‘How hard is it to spot a king?’ I looped Balky’s reins over his pack-saddle and ran both hands through my hair, throwing the length of it wide across my shoulders and back.

We reached the gates, the smoothness of the wall stretching above us to the paling sky. Hooves clattered across the flagstones as we led our animals beneath and traversed a dark tunnel through ten yards of wall.

‘I’m to ride with you.’ A voice from the black shadows to the side of the exit.

‘There you go, Sunny, we are known.’ I turned and gave him my grin. The glow from the east caught the lines of his face.

The stranger broke from the shadows, a black clot moving to join us. A woman.

She drew close, her horse a tall black stallion, a dark cloak wrapping her as if she expected to be cold.

‘Did you bring a map for us?’ I held out my hand.

‘I am the map,’ she said. I could make out only the curve of her smile.

‘And how did you know us?’ I asked, returning my hand to the reins.

She said nothing, only touched her fingers to her cheek. My scars burned for a moment, another echo of Gog’s fire no doubt for I had surely forgotten how to blush long before.

Sunny held his tongue, but I could feel the smugness radiating off him behind me.

‘I’m Honorous Jorg Ancrath, king of somewhere you’ve never heard of. The grinning idiot behind me is Greyson Landless, bastard son of some venerable line that holds a few dusty acres along the Horse Coast best used for growing rocks. You can call me Jorg and him Sunny. And we’re walking.’

‘Lesha. One sixteenth of the Provost’s horde of grandchildren.’

‘Her granddaughter? I’m surprised. I had the impression that the Provost wasn’t expecting to see us return.’

It seemed that Lesha wasn’t going to answer for she rode a hundred yards in silence at our side as we led our animals away from the city.

‘I’m sure my grandmother’s assessment of the expedition is accurate and remains unchanged.’

I still could see nothing of her within the fold of her cloak but something in the way she held herself made me sure she was kind to the eye, maybe beautiful.

‘So why would she send you, Lady Lesha?’ Sunny asked. He broke the silence I’d left for her to fill. Often the lack of a question will prompt an answer, sometimes an answer to a question you might not have thought to ask.

‘She didn’t send me – I decided to come. In any case, she won’t miss me too much. She has plenty of grandchildren and I’m far from being her favourite.’

That left a long silence that none of chose to break. Lesha dismounted and led her horse beside us.

The dawn broke, a gentle fading of greys until the eastern sky grew bright with promise. At last the first brilliant corner of the sun poked above horizon, throwing long shadows our way. I glanced at Lesha then, and lost any sting from when she had touched her cheek to mark my scarring. Each part of her face had been burned as badly as the wound I bore. Her skin held a melted quality, as if it had run like molten rock then frozen once more. The burns surprised me, but less than the fact that she had survived them. She met my gaze. Her eyes were very blue.

‘You’re still sure you want to go to the Iberico?’ She pushed back her hood. The fire had left no hair, her scalp piebald in whites, unhealthy pinks, and beige, holes where her ears lay.

‘Damned if I am,’ Sunny gasped.

I reached out and took her reins so we both stopped in the road. Balky stood shoulder to shoulder with her horse, Sunny a few yards ahead, looking back.

‘And why are you so keen to return, lady?’ I asked. ‘Why not twice shy, for you’ve surely been bitten?’

‘Perhaps I’ve nothing to lose now,’ she said, her lips lumpy lines of gristle. She didn’t look away from me.

I closed my eyes for a second and a point of red light blinked against the back of my eyelids. Fexler’s tiny red dot, drawing me across all these miles.

‘And what desire drew you there in the first place? Did you think to find wealth in the ruins, or to come back to Albaseat a great and famed explorer?’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so. Those are bad bets – not for a daughter of the provost’s family. I think the secrets called you there. You wanted answers. To know what the Builders hid there, yes?’

She glanced away then, and spat, like a man. ‘I found no answers.’

‘But that doesn’t mean the place holds none.’ I leaned in toward her. She flinched away, not expecting intimacy. My hand caught her around the back of that bald head, the skin rippled and unpleasant beneath my fingers. ‘It doesn’t mean that asking our questions is not the truest thing that creatures such as you and I can do.’ I drew her very close though she strained against it. She stood tall for a woman. ‘We can’t be trapped by fear. Lives lived within such walls are just slower deaths.’ I spoke in a whisper now, bowing my head until a bare inch stood between our faces. I half-expected her to smell of char, but she had no scent, not perfume, not sweat. ‘Let’s go there and spit in the eye of any who says the old knowledge is forbidden to us, neh?’ I kissed her cheek then, because I feared to do it and though commonsense may occasionally bind me, I’ll be fucked if fear will.

Lesha snatched herself away. ‘You’re just a child. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ But she didn’t sound displeased.

We rode until noon and took shelter from the sun in the shade of a stand of olive trees. The farmer’s wife proved enterprising enough to delay her own siesta and toil up the slopes to offer us wine, cheeses, and hard brown herb-bread. The old woman crossed herself briefly when she saw Lesha but had the grace not to stare. We set to the meal, and sent her back with an empty basket and a handful of coppers, enough for twice the amount of food were it served in a fine tavern.

‘Tell me about the Moors,’ I said to nobody in particular. The piece of cheese I licked from my finger was soft and crumbly both at once. It smelled like something that shouldn’t ever be eaten, but had a pleasingly complex and pungent taste.

‘Which ones?’ Lesha said. She looked asleep, stretched on the dusty soil, head pillowed on her bundled cloak at the base of the tree shading her.

She had a point. I’d seen at least a dozen Moors in Albaseat, wrapped in white robes, most of them all but hidden inside the hood of a burnoose, some trading, some just bound upon their business.

‘Tell me about the Caliph of Liba.’ It seemed a good place to start.

‘Ibn Fayed,’ Sunny muttered. ‘The thorn in your grandfather’s arse.’

‘Has he many like Qalasadi working for him?’ I asked.

‘Mathmagicians?’ Sunny asked. ‘No.’

‘There aren’t many like that,’ Lesha said. ‘And they don’t work for masters in any case. They follow a pure path. There isn’t much that men like that want.’

‘Not gold?’ I asked.

Lesha raised her ruined head to watch me then sat up against the tree. ‘Only rarities hold interest for their kind. Wonders such as we might find in the Iberico, but just as likely old scrolls from the Builder times, ways of calculating, old lore, the sort of cleverness that never seemed to get written down on anything that lasts, or at least that we can read.’

‘And Ibn Fayed sails against the Horse Coast to raid, or to settle, or is it punishment for not following the Moors’ prophet?’ I had my grandfather and uncle’s views on this but it’s good to look at such things from other angles.

‘His people want to return,’ Lesha said.

This was new. The provost’s granddaughter took her wisdom from the whole book, not just the current page.

‘Return?’ I had seen a Moorish hand behind much that stood in Albaseat though no one seemed eager to admit it.

‘Caliphs have ruled here as many years as kings have ruled. Before the Builders and after. The scribes today call them raiders, burners, heathens, but there’s Moorish cleverness mixed into everything we take pride in.’

‘Not just a pretty face, then,’ I said. She read, this one, for her opinions weren’t ones that could be formed on what others might think it safe to teach. The church held the Horse Coast Kingdoms and the West Ports close – any closer and they’d choke them. Priests kept a low opinion of heathens, and this far south disagreeing with a man of the cloth often proved to be a dangerous pastime. In every town a church scribe busied himself rewriting history – but they couldn’t rewrite what lay written in stone all about them.

Lesha took no offence at my jibe, or at least I think not for her scar tissue couldn’t mirror the emotions below.

We lay quiet for a time then. Almost no sound but for the distant clang of a goat bell. Why the old nanny wasn’t lying in the shade I couldn’t say. The heat wrapped us like a blanket, taking away any inclination to move.

‘You were slow to save that boy, Jorg,’ Sunny said. I thought him asleep for the past quarter hour, but clearly he’d been replaying the morning behind his eyes.

‘I didn’t save him. I saved you. You’re of some use.’

‘You would have let him die?’ Sunny sounded troubled by it.

‘I would,’ I said. ‘He was nothing to me.’ Golden curls and blood, the image played over the back of my eyelids. I opened my eyes and sat up. They broke William’s head on a milestone, swung him by the feet and beat him on the stone. It happened. The world rolled on regardless. And I learned that nothing mattered.

‘I couldn’t stand and let it happen while I watched,’ Sunny said. ‘You can’t kick a child to death in front of Earl Hansa’s guard.’

‘You stepped in for yourself, or for my grandfather?’ I asked.

‘It was my duty.’

I took an olive left at the bottom of the food basket. Firm flesh broke beneath my teeth. The warm and complicated flavour spread as I chewed.

‘Would you have stepped in if it hadn’t been your duty?’ I asked.

Sunny paused. ‘If he hadn’t been so damn big, yes.’

‘Because you couldn’t watch it happen?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Don’t live by half measures, Greyson.’ I pushed the dusty linen of my sleeve back until the scars from the hook briar showed – pale sigils against tanned skin. ‘I heard a priest once speak of the business of salvation. He urged us not to let the fact that we couldn’t save everyone from their sins stop us trying to save the people in front of us. That’s priests for you. Ready to give up in a moment. Falling over themselves to admit their frailty as if it were a virtue.’ I spat out the olive stone. ‘Either children are worth saving just because they’re children, or they’re not worth saving. Don’t let your actions be dictated by the accident that puts one in front of your eyes and hides the next. If they’re worth saving, save them all, find them, protect them, make it your life’s work. If not, take a different street so you won’t even see the one you might have seen, turn your head aside, put a hand to your eyes. Problem solved.’

‘You’d save them all, would you?’ Lesha spoke on the other side of me, voice soft.

‘I know a man who is trying to,’ I said. ‘And if I hadn’t learned better, then yes, I’d save them all. No half measures. Some things can’t be cut in half. You can’t half-love someone. You can’t half-betray, or half-lie.’

Silence after that. Even the goat slept.

The shade kept us until the shadows started to lengthen and the white blaze of the sun softened into something that could be endured.

We moved on in the afternoon. Night found our party camped in a dry valley ten miles further north, with a roof of stars and the chirp and whirr of insects to serenade us. The olive groves and cork trees lay far behind. Nothing grew in these valleys except unforgiving thorns, mesquite bushes and creosote, making a rich perfume of the night air but offering nothing to burn. We ate hard bread, apples, some oranges from Albaseat market, and washed it down with a jug of wine, so dark a red as to be near black.

I lay in the night watching the stars wheel, listening to the nicker of the horses, Balky’s occasional snort and stamp, Sunny snoring. From time to time Lesha whimpered in her sleep, a soft thing but full of hurt. And rising around it all, the relentless orchestra of night-crawlers, the sound swelling in waves as if an ocean rose about us as the sun fell. I held the copper box in one hand, the other touched the ground, grit beneath my fingertips. Tomorrow we would walk again. It seemed right to walk, and not just to save taking a good horse into poisoned lands. Some places a man needs to have his own two legs take him. Some journeys need a different perspective. The miles mean more if you have travelled them one step at a time and felt the ground change beneath your feet.

At last I closed my eyes and let the multitude of stars be replaced by a single red one. A single star brought the wise men to a cradle in Bethlehem. I wondered if a wise man would follow Fexler’s star.

7
Chella’s Story

Six Years Ago

Defeated in the Cantanlona Swamps

The smell of soil, of earth that crumbles red in the hand, just so, and lets you know you’re home. The sun that lit a life from baby to headstrong young man arcs between crimson sunrise and crimson sunset. In the dark, lions roar.

‘This is not your place, woman.’

She wants it to be her place. The strength of his longing drew her here, with him, riding the wake of his departure.

‘Go home.’ His voice is deep with command. Everything he says sounds like wisdom.

‘I can tell why he liked you,’ she says. She has no home.

‘You like him too, but you’re too broken to know what to do with that.’

‘Don’t dare to pity me, Kashta.’ Anger she’d thought burned out flares once more. The red soil, white sun, low huts, all seem further away.

‘My name is not yours to conjure with, Chella. Go back.’

‘Don’t order me, Nuban. I could make you my slave again. My toy.’ His world is a bright patch now at the corner of her vision, detail lost in jewelled beauty.

‘I’m not there any more, woman. I’m here. In the drumming circle, in the hut shadow, in the footprint of the lion.’ Each word fainter and deeper.

Chella lifted her face from the stinking mud and spat foul water. Her arms vanished into the mire at the elbows, thick slime dripped from her. She spat again, teeth scraping the mud from her tongue. ‘Jorg Ancrath!’

The web of necromancy that she had spun through the marsh month after month until it pervaded every sucking pool and mire, reaching fathoms deep to even the oldest of the bog-dead, now lay tattered, its strength bleeding away, corrupted once more by the lives of frogs and worms and wading birds. Chella found herself sinking and summoned enough of what strength remained to flounder onto more solid ground, a low mound rising from the mud.

The sky held the memory of blue, faded, as if left too long in the sun. She lay on her back, aware of a thousand prickles beneath her, of being too cold on her sides, too hot on her face. A groan escaped. Pain. When a necromancer has spent too much power, when death has burned out of them, only pain remains to fill the hole. After all, that’s what life is. Pain.

‘Damn him.’ Chella lay panting, more alive than she had been in decades, barely treading the margins of the deadlands. Her teeth ground over each other, muscles iron, the hurt washing across her in waves. ‘Damn him.’

A crow watched her, glossy black, perched on the stone that marked the mound’s highpoint.

The crow spoke, a harsh cawing that took on meaning from one second to the next. ‘It’s not the pain of returning that keeps the necromancer away from life. It’s not that which keeps them so far away – as far as they can go without losing their grip on it. It’s the memories.’

The words came from the crow’s beak but they had been her brother’s, years ago, when he first taught her, first tempted her with what it meant to be death-sworn. In moments of regret she blamed him, as if he had talked her into corruption, as if mere words had parted her from all that was right. Jorg Ancrath had put an end to all her brother’s talking, though. Beheading him beneath Mount Honas, eating his heart, stealing away some part of his strength.

‘Fly away, crow.’ She hissed it past clenched teeth. But memories had started to leak behind her eyes, like pus from a wound, welling up where fingers press.

The crow watched her. Beneath its thin and clutching claws the stone lay lichen spattered, patched in dull orange, faded green, as if diseased. The bird held Chella’s slitted gaze, its eyes bright, black, and glittering. ‘No necromancer truly knows what waits for them as they walk the grey path into the deadlands.’ It cawed then, harsh and brief as the speech of crows should be, before returning to her brother’s voice and to his lessons. ‘Each of them has their reasons, often horrific reasons that would turn the stomachs of their fellow men, but whatever their motivation, however strange and cold their minds, they don’t know what it is that they have begun. If it could be explained to them in advance, shown on one foul canvas, none of them, not even the worst of them, would take the first step.’

He hadn’t lied. He had spoken the whole truth. But words are only words and they seldom turn a person from their path unless they want to be turned.

‘I followed you, Cellan. I took your path.’ She remembered his face, her brother’s face, from a year when they had been young together, children. A happy year. ‘No!’ The pain had been better than this. She tried not to think, to make a stone of her mind, to allow nothing in.

‘It’s just life, Chella.’ The bird sounded amused. ‘Let it in.’

Behind screwed-shut eyes images fought for their moment, to hold her regard if just for an instant before the tide of remembering swept them aside. She saw the crow there, dipping its scarlet head into an open corpse.

‘Life is sweet.’ Again the caw. ‘Taste it.’

She snatched for the crow, lunging, one pain-clawed hand reaching. Only to find it gone. No flap of wings, no scolding voice from high above, just one broken and bedraggled feather, as if that was all that there had ever been.

The sun passed overhead, witness to Chella’s long agony, and at last, in the dark beneath a host of stars, she sat. Her head throbbed with memory. Not a complete mapping of the life she had stepped away from, but enough meat on the skeleton to match with where she stood upon the threshold of death and life. She hugged herself, feeling at once how her ribs stood out, how sunken her belly, how withered her chest. The coldest fact, though – the harshest judgment, came from the sum of all her remembering. No tragedy had driven her along the path she chose. She hadn’t run from any particular horror, no offence too vile to live with, no terror nipping at her heels. Nothing but common greed: greed for power, greed for things, and curiosity, of the everyday cat-killing kind. Such were the needs that had set her walking among the dead, mining depravity, rejecting all humanity. Nothing poetic, dark, or worthy, just the mean little wants of an ordinary little life.

Chella drew a deep breath. She resented having to. Jorg Ancrath had done this to her. She felt her heart thump in her chest. Barely more than a child and he had beaten her twice. Left her lying here more alive than dead. Made her feel!

She picked a leech from her leg, then another, fat with her blood. Her skin itched where mosquitoes had taken their fill. It had been years since she held any interest for such creatures, years since they could even touch her without snuffing out the tiny flickers of life in their soft and fragile bodies.

The marsh stank. It hit her for the first time, though she had spent months in its embrace. It stank, and tasted worse than it smelled. Chella pulled herself up, weak in her legs, trembling. The cool of night on her mud-caked nakedness accounted for some of her shivering, hunger and fatigue for a little more, but most of it was fear. Not of the darkness or the swamp or of the long journey through harsh lands. The Dead King scared her. The thought of his cold regard, of his questions, of standing before him in whatever dead thing he chose to wear, her wrapped in the tatters of her power and speaking of failure.

How had it even come to this? Necromancers had been the masters of death, not its servants. But when the Dead King first rose unbidden amongst the darkest of their workings the necromancers knew fear once more, though they thought it abandoned and forgotten in their path. And not just Chella’s small cabal beneath Mount Honas. She knew that now, though for a year and more she had thought the Dead King a demon woken by her delving into places not meant for men, a creature focused on her alone, then on her brother and the few around them. But the Dead King spoke to all who looked past life. Any who reached through and drew back what could be found beyond the veil to refill the remains of those who had passed. All who reached for such power would find themselves, sooner or later, holding the Dead King’s hand. And he would not ever let them go.

And why had he sent her against this boy? And how had she failed?

‘Damn you, Jorg Ancrath.’ And Chella fell back to her knees and vomited up a dark and sour mess.

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