King of Thorns be-2

by Mark Lawrence

  “No!” I shouted it. I wouldn’t let him take this memory from me.

  “No what?” Fexler had asked.

  “I…forget,” I had said.

  “No?” Makin asked at my side, back in the corridors of the Haunt, the Prince of Arrow waiting outside with his sword and thousands more behind.

  I shook my head. My hand held the empty box, crushed now in my grip, blood on it from old thorn-scars bleeding once more. The box fell from me, and I kicked it to the wall.

  “No,” I said. “Just no.”

  Father Gomst waited for us in the courtyard. A path had been cleared through the dead. They lay heaped to either side as if it were the road into hell. And the smell of it, Brothers! It made my stomach rumble. And worse, as I walked that path between the corpses, stacked and charred, they twitched. Hands red in ruin flexed at my passing, burned skin sloughing from fingers. Heads lolled, dead eyes found me. The men with me, focused in their purpose, didn’t see it, but I saw, I felt them all, uneasy in their new slumbers as the Dead King watched me through them.

  Never open the box.

  Death and fire had their hooks in me. Deeper than deep. And each had started to pull.

  “I should be tending the dying,” Father Gomst said, almost shouting to be heard over the screaming from the circle gallery where they had been taken.

  “Let the dying tend to themselves,” I said. I knew that Father Gomst would have been no comfort to me when I lay groaning in the Heimrift. I saw Grumlow at the keep doors, hanging back in the shadows. I waved him forward. “Show the dying a little mercy, Grumlow,” I said. He nodded and departed.

  I knew I would have appreciated Grumlow’s quick sharp mercy back in the Heimrift rather than a slow exit accompanied by Father Gomst’s moralizing.

  We walked along the pathway, cleared of the dead, but not the grease of burned flesh, the pieces of skin, the charred outlines of men. No one spoke; even Rike looked grim. It was appropriate though. My uncle, the Duke of Renar, had been a burner. He had spread his own terror that way. And I had come to take the place from him with Gog at my side, filling the courtyard with cremations. The Prince of Arrow had it right when he called the Ancraths the darkest branch of the Steward tree. I had long wondered if I would stand against Orrin of Arrow when he came a-calling. He was perhaps the brightest fruit from the branches of the emperor’s line. In the four years since I claimed the Highlands I had walked the empire, returning at last to suppress cousin Jarco’s uprising in the west, then battled less tangible foes, sickness in my people and in the economy. In the same span the Prince of Arrow had built his strength and taken five thrones. It was perhaps only the repeated whispering of the wise, telling me I must cede him the empire throne, that made me think of opposing his march to the Gilden Gate. I do not like to be told.

  Now though, with the copper box torn open and my memories and sins returned to me, I felt that more had been restored, as if I had been a shadow of myself, almost me, but with something vital stolen away, something so bonded to my crimes that Luntar had been forced to set it also into his box of memories. I might not live to see the sun set on this day of blood, but if I did, four years would not pass again and find me no closer to my goals.

  We walked out through the ruins of the sprawl-town where burning chunks of the Haunt’s outer walls had left only wreckage in their path. No trace of Jerring’s stables where Makin had once rolled in dung to be ready for the road.

  Even now I could end this. The Prince would accept a peace: his progress was too important to him not to. And who would say that he would make a worse emperor than I? I could match the very worst of his crimes with my own then trump them with darker deeds.

  There had been times aplenty, in the clarity of high places among the peaks, when I had thought to leave Orrin of Arrow a clear path. But things change. A different Jorg approached the duelling ground, a different Prince of Arrow. This wedding day had seen Jorg Ancrath remade in an older mould. I had that old thirst on me once again. Blood would flow.

  Music rose around me, faint at first. A piece my mother used to play on the piano. A rare instrument, a complex thing of wires and keys and hammers, ancient, but the notes she scattered from her right hand were clear and high, pure like stars against the black and rolling melody from her left. Sometimes just a single ice-pure note can catch the breath in your lungs, and a second, off tempo, thrown into the void, can command chills across your skin. A small run, a flutter of the hand over the blue notes, can take you any where, any time, make you feel new, or settle the press of years upon you, heavy enough to stop you drawing breath.

  We walked through broken stone, charred timbers. The melody pulsed under the crackle of flame, her left hand running through the deepest notes. Rike towered above me on one side, my uncle walked on the other. I felt the high refrain. I saw my mother’s hand finding the high notes, the black keys, the ones that made me ache inside my chest, like the cries of gulls above wild seas. After so many years of watching her hands play in silent memory, I heard her at last, I heard her music.

  Down the mountainside, down toward the serried expanse of the Prince’s army. Still the music, the deep slow melody, the high and broken counterpoint, as if the mountains themselves had become the score, as if the glories of hidden caves and secret peaks had been wrapped around the ageless majesty of the ocean and turned into the music of all men’s lives, played out by a woman’s fingers, without pause or mercy, reaching in, twisting, laying us bare.

  To the level ground before the grey bulk of Rigden Rock. The music slowing now, the notes scattered, just the counterpoint played out in the highest octave, sad notes, faltering, faint. I glanced at Makin, remembering that first day when he handed me a wooden sword. All those earnest boys of his ready to learn his game. I’d shown them that it wasn’t play, that it’s always about winning, but I don’t think they understood it even then, even with the best of them lying choking on the floor.

  A great trebuchet lay burning by the rock. It must have ignited closer to the walls and been dragged this far before they realized it was a lost cause. I wondered if it were the one that threw the rock at my bedchamber. The flames watched me. They leaned toward me.

  The Prince of Arrow stood waiting, the dragons still clutching his namesakes on the rainbow sheen of his Teuton armour. His five knights stood at the agreed distance and I left my seconds at the same remove. They made a funny line, Rike towering at the centre looking like six kinds of bad news. Makin and Robert to either side. Old Gomst on the right wearing every holy thing he owned in the hope that nobody would stick an arrow in him, and old Keppen on the left, a sour face on him as if he had no time for this foolishness.

  I walked over to meet the Prince.

  “Open your keep to me and we can end this.” The Prince’s voice muffled within his helm, dark eyes watching.

  “You don’t really want me to,” I said. “Better this way.” I turned my blade to catch the light. “Stop trying to be your brother. Him I would have opened the gates for. Maybe.”

  The Prince lifted his visor. He offered a fierce and joyless smile then pulled the helm clear, running a hand back across hair bristling, thick and short and black.

  “Hello, Egan,” I said.

  “I liked you better as road-filth,” he said. “It suited you.”

  Smoke from the burning siege engine drifted across us. I heard Rike cough.

  “I like your armour. I may take it for myself when they pry it from your corpse,” I said.

  He frowned, black brows meeting. “You’re right-handed. What game is this?”

  I set my left hand to my sword hilt. “I often fight right-handed. I hope you haven’t based your assessment of my skills on spies who saw that…I’m much better with my left.”

  Egan shifted his weight onto his back heel. “You fought Orrin with your right…”

  “True,” I said. “I was sorry to hear that you killed Orrin. He was a better man than both of us. Perhaps the best man o
f our generation.”

  “He was a fool,” Egan said, fixing his helm in place again.

  “Too easy with his trust maybe. I heard that you stabbed him in the back and watched him bleed to death?”

  Egan shrugged. “He would never have fought me. He would have talked. And talked. And talked.” He spoke as if it were nothing, but it haunted him. I could see it in his eyes.

  “And how did Katherine take news of Orrin’s death?” I asked.

  I saw him pale. Just half a shade. “Prepare to defend yourself,” Egan said. He drew his sword. I paid it no heed.

  “I told Orrin that I would decide about him on the day he came to the Highlands again,” I said. “I think that I would have followed him and called him emperor. I hope that I would have. You should have left it for two weeks-then you could have murdered him after moving through the Highlands. It would have worked out better for you.”

  Egan spat. “We are two fratricides met for battle. Are you ready?”

  “You know why I’ve practised with the sword every day since we last met?” I asked.

  “So it would take me a few moments longer to kill you?” Egan asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Why then?”

  “So you would believe that I’d stand against you in a fair fight,” I said.

  I raised my right hand, pointing the gun at him from beneath the plate-sized buckler.

  “What’s that?” asked Egan. He took a step back.

  “It has the word COLT stamped into the metal if that helps. Think of it as a crossbow, but all squeezed down into one small tube. You can thank an echo called Fexler Brews for it,” I said.

  I shot Egan in the stomach. The bullet punched a small hole in his armour. I knew from testing on a watermelon that the hole on the other side would be larger.

  “Bastard!” Egan staggered back.

  I made to shoot him in the leg but the gun jammed. “Lucky that didn’t happen first try, neh?” I drew my own blade, in my left hand.

  He almost blocked the swing of my sword. I had to admit he was pretty good. The blade crunched into his knee and he went down.

  The five knights Egan brought with him started to charge. I fiddled with the gun, banging it against the hilt of my sword. I raised it again and fired, once, twice, three, four, five times. They all went down with red holes in their faces. I would have missed with my left hand.

  “Bastard!” Egan tried to crawl toward me.

  “This is not your game!” I shouted. Loud enough for Arrow’s thousands to hear if they hadn’t been screaming for my blood as they surged forward. I shrugged. “I don’t play by the rules you choose.”

  I knocked Egan’s sword from his hand and waved my seconds forward. “Bring Gomst!”

  The gun had no bullets left so I threw it and the buckler aside and crouched behind Egan to pull his helm clear. I had to use my knife on the straps. I may have cut him a little.

  “You don’t have to end like this, Egan.” I took hold of his neck. “There’s death in my fingers, you know? It hurt me when you named me fratricide, but it’s true. I killed poor Degran without even thinking about it. Can you feel it yet? Can you imagine what I can do when I am thinking about it? When I actually want to hurt you?”

  He screamed then, as loud as I’ve ever heard a man scream.

  “See?” I said, when there was a gap. “I’m not proud of how I learned to do that-but there it is, the devil makes work for idle hands-I can kill parts of your spinal cord and leave you in that much pain for the years before you die. I can paralyse you and take away your speech so no one will know how you suffer and you will not be able to seek or beg for an end.”

  The Prince’s soldiers came on at a run, but they had a lot of mountainside to cover.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  I had already killed the link between his mind and his muscles so he knew I wasn’t lying. I was only lying when I implied I might be able to restore it. “Let’s be friends,” I said. “I know I might not be able to trust you even if you called me brother…but do it anyway.”

  “What?” Egan said.

  “Jorg! We need to run!” Uncle Robert put a hand on my shoulder.

  I ignored him and let more pain flood through Egan. “Call me brother.”

  “Brother! BROTHER! You’re my brother,” he cried, then screamed, then gasped.

  “Father Gomst, did you hear that?” I asked.

  The old man nodded.

  “Let’s make it official,” I said. “Adopt me into your family, Brother.”

  I hurt him again.

  “Jorg!” Makin pointed at the thousands coming our way, as if I hadn’t noticed.

  “I…You’re adopted. You’re my brother,” Egan gasped.

  “Excellent.” I let him fall. I stood and wiped his blood from my hands onto Makin’s cloak.

  “We need to run!” Makin took a few quick steps toward the Haunt to encourage me.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “We’d never make it.”

  “What’s your plan?” Makin asked.

  “I’d hoped they would just give up. I mean it’s not as if they like this pile of dung.” I kicked Egan in the head, but not too hard: I might yet need that foot for running. “I’ve killed more than half of the bastards. Both their princes are gone. You’d think they’d just go home!” I shouted this last part at their ranks, close enough to see faces now.

  “That’s it?” Uncle Robert asked. “You just hoped?”

  I grinned and faced him. “I’ve lived the last ten years on hunches, bets, hope, and luck.”

  The fire danced behind him as timbers fell from the trebuchet. The flames held that same strangeness as those in the castle, a flat brittle look. Crimson striations flushed through them, a stippled effect…

  “I am going to watch you die.” Sageous stood to my left, naked but for a loincloth despite the cold, every inch of him written upon.

  He had surprised me but I tried not to let it show. I stepped toward him.

  “I’m not here. Will you never learn, Jorg of Ancrath?” I could see he hated me. That in itself made a small victory, putting some emotion in those mild cow-eyes of his.

  “Are you not?” I asked.

  He looked at Egan, limp and bleeding in his rainbow armour. “I could have done great things with that one. Do you know how long it took to find a man so powerful and yet so malleable? I couldn’t work with Orrin. He had less give in him than your father, and that’s saying a lot.”

  “You set him to kill Orrin?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t hard. It needed the slightest push in the right direction. Sweet Katherine proved too tempting and poor Orrin was just in the way. Men like Egan have only one answer to things being in their way.”

  “So many little pushes, dream-witch,” I said.

  “You probably don’t even remember the dream that made you beg to visit Norwood that day, do you, Jorg?”

  “What?” Images bubbled at the back of my mind. The fair at Norwood. The bunting. I had wanted to go. I’d pestered my mother. I’d almost dragged them into that carriage. “It was you?”

  “Yes.” He showed me a tight vicious smile. “Your sins cried out for it.” He mimicked me.

  “I was a child…”

  Sageous looked down at Egan. “They cry out for it now.”

  A cold fire rose through me. “I’ll tell you what my sins cry out for, heathen. They cry out for more. They call for company.” And I stepped toward him.

  “I am not here, Jorg,” he said.

  “But I think you are.”

  I felt him try to weave my vision, try to walk away in dream. And then I saw her. A ghost of her. Katherine white with anger and the more beautiful with it. A ghost of her at his shoulder, waiting in the place he sought to run to, like a mirage on hot sand, her lips moving without sound, chanting something. I could see her sitting on horseback, with the same knights around her that she brought with her from Arrow’s palace. Somewhere back
in the mass of that army Katherine rode her horse blind, her eyes bound by visions as she cast spells of her own. And with each silent word from the tight line of her mouth Sageous grew more solid, more there.

  I reached for him. “I met a man who wasn’t there…” My hands almost found the heathen, the stuff of him slipping away as my fingers closed. What had Fexler said? It’s all about will. Put aside the skulls, the smokes, the wording of spells, and at the bottom of it all is desire. “He wasn’t there again today.” Wanting makes it so. “Oh, how I wish he’d always stay.” And my grasping hands found him. Whatever may be said about the aftertaste, in the moment revenge tastes sweeter than blood, my brothers.

  I seized his head and tore it from his shoulders as though I were a troll and he only human, for he had walked too long in dream and his flesh was rotten with it, tearing like the scribbled parchment it resembled. He made his own silent screams then and tried to die. But I held him there. I let the necromancy bind him into his skull.

  “There is not sufficient hurt in this world for you.” And the fire that burned in my bones, that echoed in my blood, lit about my hands and he burned with it also, trapped, living, and consumed.

  I threw his head toward the oncoming troops. It bounced flaming on the rocks, flesh bubbling, lips writhing.

  Burning was too good for him.

  I walked toward the flaming wreck of the trebuchet, the fire running up my arms now.

  “Jorg?” Makin asked, his voice quiet as if at least half of him was hoping not to be noticed.

  “Better run,” I said.

  “We can’t outrun them,” Rike growled.

  “From me,” I said.

  The fire leapt as I approached it. It looked like glass, like a window. Behind me Makin and the others ran. I laughed. The joy of it, the roaring joy of destruction. That’s why the flames dance. For joy.

  “There’s only one fire,” I said, and I knew Gog watched me from it.

  I reached into the blaze and found him, flame-made, his white-hot hand in mine, the fragments of his lost body still in my flesh, preserving me. In the core of me this new fire magic-call it magic, or understanding, or empathy-made war on the necromancy that still infected my blood.