Road Brothers

by Mark Lawrence

  “They’re lost.” Hemmac backed away, the sores on his neck oozing in reaction to the toxin.

  “They’re my kin.” Gorgoth stood at the edge, hesitating as Jane had known he would hesitate. “Go back, my friend. I will find them.” And, gritting his teeth, Gorgoth jumped, as Jane had known he would jump.

  The glow-bar showed thirty yards of pipe ahead, and thirty yards to the rear. A rusty grating could just be seen where the shadows gathered. The boys might have squeezed through the gaps. Alithea could have broken through. But it stood intact. Gorgoth went the other way, bare feet splashing though the toxic stream.

  Coughing and gasping Gorgoth staggered on. Perhaps a mile, perhaps less. His chest ached, the poison burned in his lungs and his ribs seemed to be trying to burst free. Ahead a metallic thrashing echoed down the pipe, distant but growing closer. At last the pipe emptied into a large chamber, the floor flooded, a forest of columns supporting a flat ceiling. Gorgoth’s light couldn’t reach the far wall. The thrashing came louder here, reverberating through the room, the beating of swords on armour perhaps. Gorgoth dropped down into the still waters, relieved to find they reached only to his knees and that the poisons felt more dilute here.

  Gorgoth waded toward the source of the noise. Islands of scum and rafts of decaying matter dotted the expanse of water between the pillars. Here and there thick chains hung from rusting rails on the ceiling. The glow-bar’s light swung the shadows of the pillars all around as he advanced. When Gorgoth bumped up against Alithea’s body it took him a few moments to understand that it had been a person, and several more to realise that it was his younger sister. The boom of his distress echoed back at him from distant walls and within few heartbeats the thrashing sounds halted.

  The first noise to break the silence was the keening of infants, faint but clear. Gorgoth started forward, splashing through the water, now thigh-deep, creating a bow-wave as he pressed on.

  The forest of slim pillars marched off in all directions with regular steps. In places the ceiling sagged dangerously between them, dripping slime from dark cracks. In others it had partly fallen and rubble waited below the water to trip the unwary. Gorgoth made directly toward the cries of distress but didn’t get far before the thrashing noises recommenced and drowned them out.

  Fifty yards further in and the glow-bar revealed the source. The two small boys had scrambled up ropes of some Builder-stuff that hung from the ceiling. A collapse had exposed the veins within the stone where Builder-fire once ran. The boys now huddled together on a ledge in the cavity left in the roof by the falling stone. Below them paced a mechanism of silver-steel plates, built in rough semblance of a man, as the leucrota are. The thing stood somewhat shorter than Gorgoth and considerably less wide, trailing twists of wire below, hung above with strands of slime, some of its plates dented, others pitted as if something had eaten away at them. The eyes it fixed upon Gorgoth when it rotated its head toward the light were grey and multi-faceted, the hands it raised more complex than his own, fingers of metal or ceramic meshing and unmeshing. He had found the ruins of a similar servant once years before, though that was larger, and one time Yongma had struggled back from an exploration of the deep tunnels with a silver steel skull almost a yard across, but none among the leucrota had seen one still living – if living were the right way to describe something made from cogs and wire.

  Without challenge or cry the thing rushed forward, swerving around a number of heavy chains that trailed from a ceiling gantry. Gorgoth charged too, turning his shoulder and trying to toss the creature over his back. The impact was like being hit with a boulder dropped from a height. Gorgoth’s weight and strength, unmatched among the leucrota, were nothing. He found himself flung back, the waters closing about him. The cold shock of the water and the hot agony of his arm combined to set him lurching to his feet. The glow-bar rested on the bottom close by, illuminating the area with an eerie greenish light that moved with the waves. The steel creature turned back toward him. Gorgoth tried to raise his arms in defence but only one lifted. He dived aside as his enemy charged again. It would not have saved him but the creature tripped on submerged rubble and its outstretched hands missed their target by inches.

  Gorgoth found himself falling too and snatched at the hook on the end of one of the hanging chains. The chain came loose, pouring down through its housing to join him in the glowing water.

  Cursing Gorgoth surged to his feet and splashed to the pillar closest to the boys. Behind him the Builders’ construct righted itself and started to follow. Gorgoth found himself still holding the chain and swung it, not at the monster but at the pillar. It looped around, the hook securing it to itself, and he raced on, using the chain as an anchor to allow a tight turn about the pillar. The construct pursued but found itself unable to match Gorgoth’s turning circle. Its feet went out beneath it and again it went sprawling with a splash.

  Gorgoth halted, panting, and watched the creature break the surface again, water streaming from its armour. It advanced more slowly hands raised. Gorgoth wondered if Jane had seen him die here, just as she had seen Alithea die, shredded by the implacable strength of those lifeless fingers. He rolled his shoulders, life returning to his numbed arm, along with pain. The chain he held ran for several more yards and the far end also terminated in a hook.

  The creature leapt. Gorgoth swung the chain and twisted aside. His enemy hammered into the pillar with a stone-splintering impact but somehow iron-hard fingers caught Gorgoth’s left arm and right shoulder. With a roar Gorgoth threw himself backward. If he hadn’t been soaked and hung about with slime he would never have slid from the construct’s grasp. Slippery as he was he only escaped by leaving skin behind, and because the creature’s pursuit came to an abrupt end at the end of the chain now hooked about it. Red furrows oozed where the construct had held gripped shoulder. The machine itself recoiled toward the pillar, jerked back by its new leash.

  “Run!” Gorgoth, turned and followed his own advice. He ran in a desperate fury of splashing while in his wake the construct ground its gears and hurled itself after him. The sounds of Gorgoth’s flight became lost in a deafening crash. The light vanished and rush of water sent him sprawling.

  He rose in darkness, spitting foulness, his chest agony.

  He stood blind, listening. The pillar must have given before the chain did, and the roof collapse must have buried both the construct and light. Pieces of the ceiling continued to fall, their splashes breaking the silence in irregular bursts.

  “Are…” His voice, always deep, rumbled out deeper than he had thought possible. “Are you there?” The boys had no names – you didn’t name a child until you knew it would survive.

  No answer.

  Gorgoth stood, dripping. He had no idea in which direction the pipe lay. He moved slowly toward the next splash, huddled around the torture of his chest. His only hope was to find the glow-bar beneath the rubble. A distant hope.

  His feet found what he took for the out skirts of the collapse. As he bent to begin his task a faint light broke out across the water. The two boys crouched atop the pile, thin things, ribs showing, spines knobbled, their skins stippled all over in scarlet and black, marked by the poisons. The older one held his hand before him and all across it the skin glowed like iron in a blacksmith’s forge. An echo of Jane’s own starlight, but carrying a heat with it, making the infant steam.

  A fresh pang of agony made Gorgoth look down with an oath. His ribs were beginning to break from his sternum and push out from his skin. Builder poisons didn’t kill leucrota, they twisted them. If he stayed here much longer he wouldn’t recognise himself.

  In the hot light Gorgoth got his bearings then staggered back toward the pipe. He said nothing to his nephews. They would follow or they wouldn’t. He couldn’t claim to have come to save them. The pain in his chest passed belief. Anymore and he would dash his head against a pillar to make it stop. It was the sort of choice he offered the boys. A quick end sacrificed to the nec
romancers to pay the tribe’s blood-debt, or a slow death, twisted by their own strangeness until it throttled them.

  Scraping himself back over the pipe exposed his rib bones, they broke free of the skin and reached from his chest like a monster’s claw. The boys stood in the water below, neck deep on the shortest one, the taller one holding his hand aloft, still glowing. Gorgoth reached down and swung them up. He took the glowing hand and felt its searing heat. Gorgoth could run his fingers through the embers of a fire unblistered, the child felt hotter.

  Minutes later the three of them emerged from the collapsed pipe into the Builder passage where Gorgoth had parted with Hemmac. If his sister had matched his height she could have escaped with her children rather than led them away to her death.

  None of them spoke on the return journey. The children strange and silent, the older boy’s glow fading until in the last mile Gorgoth led them blind, only the patter of small feet to let him know he wasn’t alone.

  Hemmac met them at the west cavern, approaching with a pitch torch raised above him. “Thought I sniffed you coming!” He peered as they drew closer. “Alithea?”

  “No.” Gorgoth shook his head.

  “Jesu!” Hemmac stepped back when Gorgoth came into the light. “It was bad down there.” His eyes roamed Gorgoth’s chest. “You ain’t pretty no more, friend.”

  “I never was.” Gorgoth met the man’s eyes. “Now it shows.” He had followed his sister on a monster’s business and returned a monster. “Where’s Jane?”

  “Where she always is.” Hemmac shrugged. Behind him, black against the dance of pitch fires in the mouths of a dozen caves, the leucrota went about their lives. “She’s down by the lake.”

  Gorgoth nodded and led on, taking the torch Hemmac offered. A few minutes later he trudged down the shingle to sit beside his sister. The two boys scampered around them, picking up stones, examining them, discarding them.

  “You know what happened.”

  Jane nodded. Her face showed no surprise at the changes in him. She had never known surprise.

  “You know how I feel.”

  “I know what you will do,” she said. “I don’t know how you feel, brother. I should like to know.”

  “You were twice the elder boy’s age before you showed any strangeness, Jane. And you barely survived the changes. You screamed for a year. Two of the tribe were killed when you flashed over.”

  “This is all true.” Jane nodded. “It is not how you feel though.”

  Gorgoth took the castle-forged knife from his belt. He turned it in his hand, his fingers had thickened in the poisoned water, the skin had split and itched miserable. He let the blade catch Jane’s light and danced it across the water. How did he feel?

  “I am their father now. I am father to two extra-ordinary brothers whose potential for destruction is unmatched. I cannot keep them. We cannot keep them. But what father would ever allow the murder of his children, or raise his own knife to them?”

  “You want to be a good man in a world that offers you no choices for goodness,” Jane said.

  “Yes.”

  “There’s always a choice, brother.”

  “But you said-”

  “Knowing the future has taken my choices from me. I would never steal yours from you. Which is why I will not speak of what will happen.” Jane put a silver hand on Gorgoth’s arm, tiny against the width of his muscle. “But I am proud of you, little brother. Proud.”

  “But-”

  “Someone is coming, Gorgoth. Someone who will call you brother when I am gone. Someone who will give you choices.”

  Back in the distance an iron bell rang. It rang again beneath an iron hammer. The alarm! Gorgoth got to his feet. “I have to go.”

  “There are intruders in the valley. A gang of bandits. Road-men of the worst sort.” Jane stood. She smiled. She had never smiled. “I will come with you.”

  Footnote – Here we see some of Gorgoth and Jane’s tale immediately prior to Jorg’s arrival. This story echoes some of the tension in the trilogy about the dynamic between free will and knowledge of the future. How real are our choices? It also presents Gorgoth in a rough reflection of King Olidan’s position, faced with similar choices. How much did Olidan know of his boys’ future prospects. Did he consider them doomed by their nature and carrying the potential to ruin everything around them as they raced toward that end? Was he driven wholly or in part by Sageous? Or was he just a bastard?

  The Secret

  The moon shows her face and Sim crouches, low to the ground. On the castle walls, on the high towers, a dozen pairs of eyes hunt the darkness of the slopes outside, but only the wind finds Sim, tugging at his cloak, keening in his ears. He studies the battlements, the sheer expanse of stonework, the great gatehouse hunkered above the heaviest of portcullises. When the time comes he’ll be fast. But now he waits. Sinking the teeth of his patience into the problem, watching how the guards move, how they come and go, where they rest their eyes.

  “Every good story tells at least one lie and holds a secret at its heart.”

  The young man kept his head so still as he spoke that Dara thought of the statues in her father’s hall. She watched his lips form the words, her gaze drawn by their motion amid the stillness of his face. All part of the storyteller’s art, no doubt.

  “The secret of this story hides in darkness, trapped behind the eyes of an assassin.”

  Dara let her gaze stray from Guise’s mouth to encompass the rest of him, slight within his teller’s tunic, buttoned to the top, his velvet tricorn rakishly askew, features fine, the light that had first lit her up still burning in those grey eyes.

  “Sim they called him. Perhaps it was his name. Assassins wear such things lightly. In any event Sim had been his name since the brotherhood took him in.”

  “A brotherhood? Was he was a holy man?” Dara knew the pope kept assassins – the best that money could buy.

  Guise smiled, a true storyteller doesn’t bridle at questions. When questions are not welcome the story will not allow its audience to speak. “A holy man? Of a kind... He offered absolution, dealt in peace. Steel forgives all sins.”

  When Guise smiled Dara’s heart beat faster and the lingering worry retreated. If her father discovered she’d snuck a man into her rooms, a mere commoner at that, he would double the guard – though she doubted the walls would hold more soldiers – have the bars at her window shackled together so no illicit key would open them, and worse, he would talk to her. He would summon her before the chair from which he spoke for all of Aramis and treat her not like a child but worse, like an adult in whom his trust had been misplaced. She would have to stand there, alone in that echoing expanse of marble, and explain the knotted curtain pulls she’d lowered as a rope, the alarm she’d had Clara raise to distract the guardsmen from their patrols...

  “Brother Sim took his work seriously. The taking of a life is a-”

  “Was he handsome, this Brother Sim?” Dara stretched on the couch, a languid motion, hot and sultry as the night. She felt sure a storm was building, the tree tops in the gardens had been thrashing in a humid wind when she opened the window for Guise, rain lacing the breeze. It would break soon. The distant thunder would arrive and make good on its threats.

  Dara half rolled to face the storyteller. He leaned forward on his small chair, close at hand, the story scroll unopened on his knee. About his wrist he wore her favour, a silk handkerchief, embroidered with flowers and tiny glass beads. “Was he handsome? Was he tall, this Sim?” she asked.

  “Ordinary,” Guise told her, “Unremarkable. The kind of face that might in the right light be anyone. Handsome in one instant, in the next forgettable. He stood shorter than most men, lacking the muscle of a warrior. His eyes though – they would chill you. Empty. As if he saw just bones and meat when he looked your way.”

  Dara shuddered, and Guise unrolled his scroll, fingertips floating above the characters set there, dark and numerous upon the vellum, crowded wi
th meaning. “To find out why Sim watched those walls we have to journey, first many miles to the east, and then back through the hours and days until we find him there.” Guise raised his voice, though still soft for the guards outside the door mustn’t hear him, and as he lifted his hand from the page, the story bore her away.

  Brother Sim waited, for that is what assassins must do. First they wait for their task, then for opportunity. The brotherhood had made camp in the ruin of a small fortress, amid the wreckage and char-stink of whatever battle had emptied it. Sim had sought out the highest tower, as was his wont, and sat upon the battlements, staring at the place where the road that brought them became compressed between sky and land and vanished into a point. His legs dangled above a long drop.

  “A name has been given.” Brother Jorg spoke behind Sim. He’d climbed the spiral stair on quiet feet.

  “Which name?” Sim still watched the road, leading as it did back into the past. Sometimes he wondered about that. About how a man might retrace his steps and yet still not return to the place he’d come from.

  And Brother Jorg spoke the name. He came to stand by the wall and set a heavy gold coin beside Sim. In a brotherhood all brothers are equal, but some are more equal than others, and Jorg was their leader.

  “Find us on the Appan Way when this is done.” He turned and descended the steps.

  Assassination is murder with somebody else’s purpose. Sim reached for the coin, held it in his palm, felt the weight. Coins hold purpose, they bear it like a cup. A murder should always carry a weight, even if it’s only the weight of gold. He turned the coin over in his scarred fingers. The face upon it would lead him to his victim.

  Sim rode from the fort, beneath the gutted gatehouse, his equipment stowed, his weapons strapped about his person. The brothers saw him go and made no comment. Assassination is lonely work. They each feared him in their way. Hard-bitten men, dangerous with a sharp edge or a blunt instrument, but they feared him. Everyone sleeps after all. Every man is vulnerable.