‘Wait.’ For no reason a gorge on to our left catches my eye, high above us, emptying out of the valley side.
‘This is the way.’ Snorri gestures after the departing souls ahead of us, more drifting by. His eyes are red with burst veins, like a man who has forgotten how to sleep. I feel worse than he looks.
‘Up there.’ I point at it. ‘There’s something up there.’
‘This is the way.’ Snorri repeats, starting off after the souls, head down once more.
‘No.’ And I’m climbing over boulders, a dozen paper-thin cuts on my palm where I reach out to steady myself. ‘It’s up here.’
‘I don’t sense it.’ Snorri turns toward me, exhausted, the souls dwarfed as they flow around him.
‘It’s here.’ I keep climbing, drawing my sword to balance myself, to give myself some support that doesn’t require touching the rocks.
It’s a scramble to reach the gorge and my hand stings as if vinegar has been poured into each cut. I advance along the narrow path that leads up between the gorge’s clifflike walls, Snorri a short way behind me, cursing.
It’s silent here out of the wind, at least it is once Snorri stops complaining. A pervasive quiet, ancient and deep. Our footfalls sound like sacrilege. If it were water that carved these valleys it has been gone since before man walked here. In a hell built from loneliness this seems the most desolate and most lost place that the damned might ever walk.
‘There’s nothing here, Jal, I tol—’
The narrow walls draw back just ahead of us. There’s a dell, perhaps a plunge pool where some long-dead river once fell. A single tree stands there, black, gnarled, the bare fingers of its branches stark against the dead-lit sky. Its trunk is mottled, a sickly white against the black, rising from the broad base toward the heights where the first branches divide.
Advancing, I see that the tree is both further away and more huge than I had imagined. ‘Help me up.’ There’s a step in the gorge, taller than I am. Snorri boosts me to the top. I cut my leg through my trousers. More acid slices from the bubble-fractured rock. I reach for Snorri and help him join me.
Drawing closer we see that the tree, though leafless, is laden with strange fruit. Closer still and the diseased trunk reveals its secret. Bodies are nailed to it. Hundreds of them.
If this tree were the size trees are supposed to be then we would be ants. It must be some offspring of Yggdrasil, the world-tree that stands in the heart of all things and from which worlds depend. The branches which bear fruit droop like those of the willow, dangling almost to the ground. Some reach so low I could stretch up and touch them, but I’ve no wish to. The fruit are dark and shrivelled, some a couple of feet across, some no bigger than a man’s head, all grotesque, unsettling in a way I can’t define.
The low groaning of the tree’s victims reaches us now. Men and women are pinned to its trunk, young and old, so crowded their limbs overlap, their splayed forms fitted together like interlaced fingers or the pieces of a puzzle.
We come amid the thick and sprawling tangle of the tree’s roots to its trunk, as wide as the Mathema Tower and taller still. One patch of whiteness draws my eye, paler than the others and low to the ground.
‘Hello Marco.’ I step closer, sheathing my sword, looking up at him. There he is, nailed among the hundreds, hands and feet pinned by black spikes of iron. Scores of heads turn my way, slowly, as if it takes great effort, but only Marco speaks.
‘Prince Jalan Kendeth.’ His gaze lifts. ‘And the barbarian.’
‘I’m glad you remember me.’
‘There are few curses worse than having your name spoken in Hell,’ he says.
That takes the wind from my sails. ‘W-well.’ I swallow and try to speak without stammering. ‘I’d rather have my name spoken in Hell than be nailed to a tree in Hell for all eternity.’
Marco hasn’t an answer to that.
‘I remember you,’ Snorri says. ‘The man with the papers. You had Tuttugu tortured. Why are you on this tree?’
‘Maybe this is where torturers go,’ I say.
‘It would take a forest to house them,’ Snorri says. ‘This tree would not suffice.’
‘So some more specific crime…’ I frown. This place scares me. All of Hell scares me, but this place is worse.
‘A worse crime.’ Snorri’s gaze wanders across the bodies, all naked, all pierced by nails, hanging on gravity’s rack.
‘Get me down and I’ll tell you,’ Marco says, always the banker. I can see the desperation in his eyes, though.
‘You put yourself there.’ Snorri turns to study the closest of the hanging fruit. He reaches up to touch it. ‘Ah!’ And snatches his hand back as if stung. A flush of colour spreads across the wizened husk, a fleshy pink. We watch, Snorri still rubbing his fingers. The fruit swells, like a chest inflated with a deep breath. The thing’s true shape resolves. We see limbs, coiled in tight, flesh tones mottling the previous lifeless black. The transformation lasts as long as the breath that Snorri drew in, and with his exhalation the ‘fruit’ shrivels back to its dark dry husk.
‘It … it was…’
‘It looked like a baby,’ I whisper. Only too small, head too big, limbs too tiny, fingers webbed.
‘An unborn.’ Snorri turns back to Marco. ‘That’s the fruit of this tree? Your crimes?’
I’m not listening: my eyes have found another of the tree’s fruit. Just one among hundreds, maybe thousands, but it draws me. I can’t look away. Every other thing blurs, and I’m walking toward it.
‘Jal?’ Snorri calls me from somewhere distant.
I reach up with both hands and clasp the desiccated husk. The pain isn’t in my fingers, it’s in my veins, in the marrow of each bone as something is drawn from me. Thick arms wrestle me away and I’m on the ground looking up at the unborn, pink and tiny … wet and dripping with life.
‘What are you doing?’ Snorri hauls me to my feet. ‘Have you gone mad?’
‘I…’ I look at the pink thing, this almost-child. I draw Edris Dean’s sword and the script along the blade has run crimson as if the symbols themselves are bleeding. ‘This is my sister.’
Though some magic has drawn me to her our connection ends there. I’ve never met her – she has never grown – and I have had two brothers teach me that there’s nothing holy in blood bonds. Given my elder brother, Martus, and a random stranger both dangling over a precipice and only time to save one of them, it would be my day to make a new friend. Especially if the stranger were young and female. All I have to link me to this … creature … is the memory of watching Mother die. Only sorrow binds us, and now she’s been corrupted. This nameless child has been wrought into some terror, a terror that needs to kill me to escape into the living world and keep its place there…
I hold my bleeding sword and watch the thing before me, pink, ugly, wet and raw. Snorri stands beside me and says nothing. A cry escapes me, a harsh noise, as short and sharp as the arc of my blade. Steel slices. The unborn drops, and where she hits the ground there is only dust and small dry bones.
‘Jal.’ Snorri reaches for my shoulder. I shake him off.
Above the dust something intangible is rising, ghost-pale, changing, growing, shifting swiftly through many forms. All of them her. My sister. A sleeping baby, a tiny child staggering as they do when taking first steps, a young girl, long-haired, pretty, a tall woman, slender and beautiful with Mother’s looks, dark locks coiled about her shoulders. The images change more swiftly – a mother holding tiny hands, a woman, stern-faced, a power behind her eyes, an old woman on a tall throne. Gone.
I’m left standing there, tingles up and down my arms, across my cheeks, breath sharp and shallow, a pain in my chest. Why does this hurt me? Might-have-beens are lost every second of every day. Might-have-beens, plans that come to naught, pipe-dreams, they pour into nothing, swifter than the Slidr plunging over its cliff. I stand looking down at the tiny bones as they blacken and go to dust. Not might-have-beens: should-have-
beens.
Marco laughs at me. An ugly sound, tight and full of pain, but laughter none the less, and from a man I never once saw smile in the living world. ‘It’s not finished, prince. Not over.’ He groans, struggling to move but pinned by his extremities. ‘The tree bears what the lichkin leave behind.’
‘Lichkin?’ I’ve heard of them, monsters from the deadlands, things the Dead King brought into the world to serve his purpose.
‘What do you think rides the children taken from the womb? What moulds their potential and uses that power? It is fair exchange.’ He watches me dead-eyed. He could be talking of bargains made on the floors of Umbertide’s exchanges for all the emotion he shows. ‘Where is the crime? The child that would not have lived gets to live, and the lichkin that has never lived gets to quicken and walk in the world of men where it may feed its hunger.’
I look up into the distance above us, at the flesh-mottled trunk, tented by innumerable willow-like branches, each dangling its stolen life. Is Marco the worst man pinned there? It seems unlikely. I should hate him more fiercely. I should rush at him and hack him down. But this place burns emotion from you. In place of rage I feel hollow, sad. I turn and walk away.
‘Wait! Get me down!’
‘Get you down?’ I turn back, the flame of anger guttering somewhere deep within. ‘Why?’
‘I told you. I gave you information. You owe me.’ Marco heaves each word out over a chest being compressed by his own weight.
‘This tree will not stand long enough for me to owe you, banker. Not if it stands ten thousand years and you save my life every day.’
He coughs, black blood on his lips. ‘They’ll hunt you now – the lichkin and what parts of your sister it has taken. A brother’s death would open a door for them and let them emerge together, unborn, a new evil in the world. Your death would seal them into the lands above.’
The thought of being tracked through Hell by some monster bound about my sister’s soul scares me silly but I’m damned if I’ll let Marco see it. ‘If this … thing … seeks me out I shall just have to end it. With cold steel!’ I draw my sword for good measure – the thing has, after all, been enchanted to end dead creatures as effectively as live ones.
‘I can tell you how to save her.’ He holds my gaze, eyes dark and glittering.
‘My sister?’ Saving her hadn’t been on my list – that’s Snorri’s forte. I want to walk away but something won’t let me. ‘How?’
‘It can be done now that you’ve freed her futures from the tree.’ His pain is clear in his face for once, his desperation. ‘You’ll get me down? You promise.’
‘By my honour.’
‘When you meet them in the living world, your sister and whichever lichkin wears her skin, any sufficiently holy thing will part them.’
‘And my sister will … live?’
Marco makes that ugly sound again, his laughter. ‘She’ll die. But properly. Cleanly.’
‘Sufficiently holy?’ Snorri, rumbles the words beside me.
‘Something of importance. It’s the faith of all those believers that will make it work. A focus. Not some church cross. Not holy water from a cathedral font. Some true symbol, some—’
‘A cardinal’s seal?’ I ask.
Marco nods, face lined with the pain and the effort of it. ‘Yes. Probably.’
I turn to go again.
‘Wait!’ I hear Marco gasp as he tries to reach for me.
‘What?’ I glance back.
‘Release me! We made a bargain.’
‘Do you have the paperwork, Marco Onstantos Evenaline of the House Gold? The correct forms? Are they signed? Witnessed? Do they bear the proper marks?’
‘You promised! On your honour, Prince Jalan. Your honour.’
‘Oh.’ I turn away again. ‘That.’ And start to walk. ‘If you find it, let me know.’
6
In the Liban port of Al-Aran I took ship on a cog named Santa Maria, the same vessel that took most of the salt my companions had spent the best part of the previous month hauling north from Hamada. They also found room for my three camels in the hold, and I’ll admit to a certain satisfaction at the beasts’ distress, having spent so long enduring my own distress on a camel hump.
‘I warn you, captain, God crafted these creatures for three things only. Passing wind from the rear end, passing wind from the front end, and spitting. They spit stomach acid so tell your men, and don’t let anyone venture into the hold with a naked flame or you may find yourself the master of a marvellous collection of floating splinters. Also we’ll all drown.’
Captain Malturk snorted into the bushiness of his moustaches and waved me off, turning toward the masts and rigging to shout nautical nonsense at his men.
Travel by sea is a miserable business best not spoken about in polite company and nothing of any account happened for the first four days. Oh, there were waves, the wind blew, meals were eaten, but until the coast of Cag Liar appeared on the horizon it was generally distinguishable from all my other sea voyages only by the temperature, the language in which the sailors swore, and the taste of the food coming back up.
Also, never take a camel to sea. Just don’t. Especially not three of the bastards.
Port French on Cag Liar, the southern-most of the Corsair Isles, is the first stop of many ships leaving the coast of Afrique. There are two ways to sail the Middle Sea and survive the experience. Firstly armed to the teeth, secondly armed with a right-of-passage purchased from the pirate-lords. Such things can be obtained from factors in many ports, but it bodes well for a ship to put in at Port French or one of the other main centres on the Corsairs. The code flags are changed regularly and it doesn’t do to be sailing on out-of-date flags. Plus, for a merchant, once the painful business of ‘taxes’ is concluded, there are few places in the world that offer as wide a range of goods and services as the corsair ports. They trade in flesh there too, the bought-and-sold type as well as the hired type. Slaves run mainly west to east and a trickle north to south. The Broken Empire never had a big demand for slaves. We have peasants. Much the same thing, and they think they’re free so they never run off.
Coming into port it felt good to at last see the world I knew best, the headlands thick with pine and beech and oak in place of the scattered palm trees of northern Liba. And seasons too! The forest stood rust-speckled with the first crisp touch of autumn, though on a blazing day like this it felt hard to imagine the summer in terminal decline. In place of Liba’s flat roofs the houses on the slopes above the harbour boasted terracotta tiles, sloped in a tacit admission that rain actually happens.
‘Two days! Two days!’ Malturk’s first mate, a barrel of a man named Bartoli, who seemed incapable of wearing a shirt. ‘Two days!’ A booming baritone.
‘How many?’
‘Two d—’
‘I got it, thank you.’ I wiggled a finger into my half-deafened ear and proceeded down the gangplank.
The quays of Port French are like none I’ve seen. It’s as though the contents of every brothel, opium den, gambling hall, and blood-pit have been vomited up onto the sun-soaked harbour, pushing out among the quays so that the dockhands have to weave their path among this bright and varied crowd just to tie off a hawser.
I immediately found myself swamped by maidens in all shades from jet through dusky to sun-burned, along with men trying to steer me to establishments where any vice might be indulged so long as it parts you from your coin. The most direct of all, and perhaps the most honest, were the small boys dodging in and out among the adults’ legs and attempting to lift my purse before I’d gone ten paces.
‘Two days!’ Bartoli, on the rail, watching his crew and passengers disperse. The Santa Maria would sail with or without us once its business had concluded and the code flags were hung.
After Hell, the desert, and then the sea, Port French seemed as close to heaven as makes no difference. I wandered through the crowd in a state of bliss, paying no specific attention to any of
the people trying to lure me this way or that, no matter how persistent. At one point I paused to boot a particularly annoying little cutpurse into the sea, and then at last I was off the quay and climbing into the maze of streets leading up to the ridge where all the finest buildings seemed to cluster.
Nothing paralyses a man so well as choice. Offered such a banquet after so long in the wilderness the decision stumped me. I settled at a table outside a tavern on a steep and cobbled street halfway to the ridge. I ordered wine and it came in an amphora cradled in a raffia jacket to keep it whole. I sat watching the world go by, sipping from my clay cup.
They call them the Corsair Isles and it’s true that pirating defines them, but there are millions of hot dry acres in the interior where the sea can’t even be spotted from a hill, and in those valleys they grow damned fine grapes. However cheap its container, the wine was good.
My travel-stained robes and Sahar tan made me more of an Arab than a man of Red March, only the sun-bleached gold in my hair told the lie. Certainly nobody would mistake me for a prince, which has its advantages in a town packed with robbers, thieves, pirates and pimps. Anonymous in my desert attire I took a moment to relax. Hell, I took several moments, then two hours, then three more, and enjoyed the passing hustle and bustle of close-packed living while the sun slipped across the sky.
I considered my return to Vermillion, my fortunes, my future, but most of all I considered Yusuf Malendra and his calculations. Not just Yusuf though, not just the Mathema where a hundred mathmagicians scratched away at their algebras, but all of those who saw or told or lied about the future. The völvas of the north, the magicians of Afrique, the Silent Sister with her blind eye, the Lady Blue amid her mirrors looking for reflections of tomorrow. Spiders, all of them, laying their webs. And what did that make men like me and Jorg Ancrath? Flies, bound tight and ready to have our vital juices sucked away to feed their appetite for knowing?
Jorg had it worse than me of course. That boy prince with his thorn scars. He’d escaped that tangle of briars but did he know that he hung in a larger one now, its hooks long enough to eviscerate a man? Did he know my grandmother whispered his name to the Silent Sister? That so many conspired to either make or break him? Emperor or fool – which he would be remembered as I couldn’t say, but he was one of those in the making, no doubt about it. Perhaps both. I remembered his eyes, that first night I saw him in Crath City. As if even then he looked past the world and saw all this coming his way. And didn’t give a damn.
The Wheel of Osheim Page 10