King of Thorns
Page 35
Nothing happened.
I twisted again. Easier this time. Again. I spun it several times and the ring came loose in my hand.
“Pretty,” I said.
“Look through it,” Fexler suggested.
I held it to my eye. Nothing for a second, then an image over-wrote my vision, a blue circle swirled with white patterns, intricate, infinitely detailed. For some reason it put me in mind of Alaric’s snow-globe. “It’s wonderful,” I said. “What is it?”
“Your whole world. Seen from a little over twenty thousand miles above the ground.”
“That’s a ways to fall. What are all the white swirls?”
“Weather formations.”
“Weather?” It seemed incredible that I might be seeing clouds from above rather than below, and over such reaches that their whole cycle and design lay revealed. “Weather from when? From your day?”
“From today. From now.”
“This isn’t just a painting?”
“You’re seeing the world as it happens. Your world,” Fexler said.
I shifted my grip on the ring and I plunged, or felt that I did, racing down and to the left, like an eagle diving. A small curl at the end of one vast cloud swirl now filled my vision and I could see land far below, a sparkling thread wove across the greens and browns. I stumbled but managed to keep my feet.
“I can see a river!” An old instinct bit in. Suspicion drew the ring and its visions from my eye. “Why?”
“Why?” he asked.
I spun the ring between finger and thumb. “Beware of ghosts bearing gifts, they say.”
“You’ll find that’s Greeks, but the principle is sound.” Fexler frowned. “You’re carrying something that interests me. And as it turns out you’re more than you seem. It’s not every day a battleground walks down my stairs.”
“Battleground?”
“You’re a nexus for two opposing forms of energy, young man—one dark, one light. I have technical terms for them, but dark and light serve well enough. Given a little more time they’ll tear you apart. Quite literally. It’s an exponential process, the end will be sudden and ‘violent.’”
“And you know this because?” My gaze returned to the ring.
“A lesson in life, Jorg. Whatever you look into can look back into you. The ring has scanned your brain in quite minute detail.”
My jaw clenched at that. The idea of being measured, being classified, did not appeal. “But that’s something unexpected you discovered, not what you were looking for?”
“You know what I was looking for.” Fexler smiled. “Perhaps you’d be good enough to set the ring to it for me?”
I pulled out my little box of memories. Today it seemed to tremble in my hand. The view-ring clunked against it as if both were lodestones drawn by mutual attraction. For a moment Fexler’s image pulsed more brightly.
“Interesting,” he said. “Crude but clever. Remarkable even.”
Box and ring fell apart—done with each other. Fexler fixed me with an intense stare.
“I can help you, boy. Fire and death have their hooks deep in you. Call it magic. It isn’t but this will go easier if we say it is. Your wounds anchor the enchantments, both of them trying to pull you into the domains from which they spring. Alone either one would draw you down in time, make something different of you, something no longer human. You understand me?”
I nodded. Ferrakind and the Dead King waited for me in separate hells.
Fexler’s gaze settled on the box, clenched tight in my hand. “All that saves you is that these forces are in opposition. Soon enough, though, that opposition will rip you open.”
He waited for me to speak, to beg or entreat his aid. I held my tongue and watched him.
“I can help,” he said.
“How?”
He flashed a nervous grin. “It’s done. I’ve bound both forces through that interesting little box of yours. It’s far stronger than you are. It may hold indefinitely. And while it holds the process should be halted; neither power should be able to get a better grip on you or able to pull you any further into their domain.”
“And what is it you want for this…gift?” I asked.
Fexler fended the question off with an irritable wave. “Just remember this, Jorg of Ancrath. Do not open that box. Open it and my work is undone. Open it and you’re finished.”
The box glinted as I turned it in my hand. “Pandora had one of these.”
I looked up for Fexler to share the joke, but he had gone. Several silent minutes passed, alone in the cellar, weighing box and ring in my hands. I had tickled far more than three answers from the ghost, but had a thousand more questions than when I started.
“Come back.” I sounded foolish.
The ghost did not return.
I put the ring in my pocket. Interesting or not it seemed odd that the grouch had favoured me above the others that visited him. Uncle Robert never mentioned a gift of any kind, nor any really meaningful answers to questions. Fexler wanted something from me. Something personal. That last nervous grin of his said it. He might be dead a thousand years, might be a Builder, or just the story of a Builder in a machine of cogs and magic, but before all that he was a man, and I knew men. He wanted something—something he couldn’t take but that he thought I could give.
I wondered, despite his mocking, if death held an allure for the ghost too. We aren’t meant to live forever, nor dwell in solitude. A life without change is no life. The spirit beneath Mount Honas agreed with me. Maybe the only way Fexler Brews had to tell me so was to offer me his gift. And to hope that I would help him. He wanted something, that much was sure. Everyone wants something.
I would have to think on it. The machine made Fexler. Grandfather would not thank me for destroying his source of fresh water, and neither would the men who would have to pump the fountains thereafter. Gone or not though, Fexler Brews and I were not finished with each other.
I spoke with my uncle on the night of that visit to Fexler’s cellar. We sat in the observatory tower with an earthenware jug of wine that looked old enough to have been excavated from a pharaoh’s tomb, and two silver goblets chased with rearing horses. A cool wind sighed through the arches and a bright dust of stars covered the black sky.
“Your mother used to come here when we were children,” Robert said.
“She taught us the star names,” I said. “Though William was young for it. He could only ever find the dog star and the Pole Star.” I saw Will pointing, arm stretched out as if to touch each star, finger questing.
“Sirius and Polaris.” Robert sipped his wine. “I can’t remember much more. Rowen had the mind for it. In some twins the gifts are not shared out evenly. She got the brains and the looks. I got…a knack with horses.”
“I got a knack with killing.” The wine ran over my tongue, its flavour dark and layered.
“More than that, surely.” Robert pointed out a constellation through the window arch. “What’s that one?”
“Orion.” I stood and stepped to look out. “Betelgeuse, Rigel, Bellatrix, Mintaka, Alnilam, Alnitak, Saiph.” I named the giant’s parts. “Did you feel her die? Are twins like that?”
“No.” He stared into his goblet.
“Perhaps.” He set the wine before him. “Perhaps it was like that for her. When I got trapped against Crab Cliff by the spring tide Rowen knew where to bring the guard with ropes. We were just children, not even ten years old, but she knew somehow. Another talent that didn’t split even between us.”
I watched him, half-resentful that he had so many years with her. She was my mother and yet everything about her escaped me, a little more each day, sand through fingers. I couldn’t draw her face, tell you the colour of her eyes, or any concrete thing, just angles, glimpses, moments, the scent and softness of her. The security she gave—and the night when I learned it to be a lie.
“I went to the grouch chamber this morning,” I said.
The Builders’ view-rin
g hung on a thong about my neck, under the tunic Robert’s dresser had given me. I considered drawing it out to show him, but didn’t. Habits learned on the road die hard. I had laid hands on it and it was mine; I would keep my advantage hidden. The metal weighed heavy over my heart. Perhaps guilt feels like that.
“All that dust and spiders just to have an old ghost tell you to go to hell.” My uncle sipped his wine. “I used to go down a few times a year. But the grouch never changes, and in the end I did.”
“Do you know what the machinery does?” I asked.
“Who knows what any of that devilry is for? It pumps water—I understand that much, but they say everything the Builders made did ten different things. My father has left it alone for sixty years, his father left it untouched, and his father before him. It’s from a world best forgotten. Gelleth should have taught you that.”
My wine tasted sour. The light of that Builders’ Sun reached even here into a summer’s night on the Horse Coast. He was wrong in any case. The Builders weren’t gone, we couldn’t forget them. Their ghosts echoed in machinery buried in our vaults, their eyes watched us from above clouds, we fought our little wars in their shadow. Perhaps we even waged those wars at their instigation, something to keep us busy, to have us too focused on the now to think about the then.
“Gelleth taught me a lot of things. That we’re children in a world we don’t own or understand. That we stand alone and whether I fail or succeed depends on the strength of my will. On how far I will go. And that no one will come to help us in our hour of need.” And that some things can’t be fixed even if you bring the sun to earth and crumble mountains.
I thought of Gelleth, of the ghosts Chella drew from me. Since the night of storm and thorns I’d been haunted by what others had done to me. Gelleth taught me I could also be haunted by what I’d done to others.
The dead child watched me, broken against the tower battlements, blood and hair, a reminder of William and the milestone, his eyes two bright points of starlight. Another ghost, another misfortune seeking a home.
“You never came. I thought you would come for me.” In my mind I had seen Uncle Robert ride to the Tall Castle a hundred times, with the cavalry of the House Morrow streaming behind him, to demand an accounting for his sister’s death, to claim his nephew and take him home. “If Morrow had ridden to avenge Mother’s death there would have been no Gelleth.” No years on the road. No rivers of blood. No dead child watching.
Robert studied his goblet. “You fled Ancrath before news of Rowen’s death even reached us here. Olidan was slow to send word, and the word was slow to find its way.”
“But you didn’t come.” Old anger ignited within me and I went quickly to the stair in case it boiled out. I had climbed the steps a king, a man pressing fifteen years, and now a hurt and wrathful child shouted through me, through the years.
“Jorg—”
“No!” The hand I raised to keep him in his seat shook with the fierceness of what I held back and the air seemed to shimmer with heat. I hadn’t known the memories would seize me like this.
I ran from the tower, scared that I might find the blood of a second uncle on my hands.
* * *
We calmed the hurt between us the next morning, but with pleasantries and empty words of the kind that are layered over rather than used to scour clean. I didn’t let him speak of it again. Instead I spoke of Ibn Fayed and of Qalasadi. I had been to considerable lengths to get an accounting for Mother’s death and for William’s, and yet here were two men who had come within moments of taking Mother’s whole family from me—Uncle, Grandmother, Grandfather. What’s more, the mathmagician had, with a cool head, seen through my secret and chosen to take them all before they even knew I was amongst them, to kill with poison all my mother’s kin and to see me die for it under horrible restitution. There seemed no malice in it, only calculation, but I couldn’t leave such an equation unbalanced. It wouldn’t be proper.
Robert tried to turn me from revenge. “Ibn Fayed will come to us in time and break his strength here. That will be the time for his accounting.” But I had more immediate plans. Revenge can be the easy path to follow though I have often painted it as the hardest.
I left for the last time months later, suntanned, taller, provisioned, and laden with gifts. My saddlebags bulged with them, tempting enough for any bandits I might meet. I kept what mattered most about my person. The thorn-patterned box, the Builders’ view-ring, and the weapon that killed Fexler Brews more than nine hundred years previously, a hard and heavy lump strapped beneath my arm. I’ve always seen “no” as a challenge rather than an answer.
Above those treasures though I left with a message, a mantra if you like. Do not open that box. Open it and my work is undone. Open it and you’re finished.
Never open the box.
You won’t see Brother Grumlow try to knife you, only the sorrow in his eyes as you fall.
45
Wedding day
The crash of a rock against the keep wall drowned me out. A shield fell off its hook and clattered to the floor, dust sifted down from above.
“The gate will not hold,” I said again.
“Then we will fight them in the courtyard,” Sir Hebbron said.
I chose not to mention that he had surrendered to me in the same courtyard four years earlier, with just Gog and Gorgoth at my back rather than the Prince of Arrow’s fourteen thousand men.
If Coddin were present he would have spoken of surrender himself. Not out of fear but compassion. Perhaps he might say that when we fell back to the keep he would call out for terms, so that the common folk sheltering at the Haunt might be spared.
But Coddin wasn’t present.
The dead child watched me from a shadowed corner, older and more sad with each passing year. At the corner of my vision he seemed to speak, but if I looked his way he said nothing, blue lips pressed tight. What man can hope for victory when his doom watches from every shadow? He was nothing but mine, this ghost, no trick of Chella’s, no sending of the Dead King, just a sad and silent reminder of a crime even Luntar’s little box couldn’t keep entirely secret.
Another crash and I looked away from the corner, shaking off the moment.
The knights and captains watched me, the light from high windows gleaming on their armour. These men were built for war. I considered how many of them I would sacrifice to stop the Prince of Arrow. How many I would sacrifice just to wound Arrow, just to put a bigger hole in his army.
The answer turned out to be all of them.
“When they come we will fight them in the courtyard. And through the doors of the keep, and up each stair, and to this very room if need be.” My cheek throbbed where I’d sliced it, aching at each word. I ran my fingers across the line of black and clotted blood.
“Sir Makin, Sir Kent, I want you leading the defence at the gate. I want everyone in this room out there.”
They started for the door. Kent stopped.
“Sir Kent?” he said.
“Don’t let it go to your head,” I said. “And don’t expect a ceremony.”
Kent made a slow shake of his head. I could see his eyes shine. I hadn’t thought it would mean much to him.
“Take the scorpions from the walls and set them in the yard. Put them front and centre. You’ll get one shot and then they’ll just be a barricade,” I said. “And, Makin, get some armour on.”
The Haunt had five scorpions, giant crossbows on wheels that could send a spear four hundred yards. Line enough men in front of them and you might get something like the chunks of meat on skewers served at table in Castle Morrow.
“Not you, Miana. Stay,” I said as she made to follow the knights. “And Lord Jost!” I added. “I am depending on your help. Everything is in place.”
Lord Jost set his conical helm on his head and flicked the chainmail veil out over the back of his neck. He looked from me to Miana. “Our alliance requires that the union be sealed, King Jorg.”
“Even so.” No room for negotiation on that pinched face. He turned to follow Sir Makin. “Your grandfather knows the blood of both your parents runs in you, sire. I cannot act until the alliance is complete.”
And that left me on my throne in an echoingly empty room with Miana in her wedding whites and two guards at the door watching their feet.
“Crap.” I jumped up and took her hand. Leading her to the door. It felt like taking a child for a walk.
I brushed past the guards and hurried to the east tower staircase. Miana had to hitch her skirts and half run to keep up as I took the steps two and three at a time.
A hefty kick sent my chamber doors slamming open. “Out!” I shouted and several maids ran past me, clutching cloths and brushes. I think they had been hiding rather than cleaning.
“Lord Jost requires that I remove your virginity from you,” I said to Miana. “Or the House Morrow can’t support me.” I hadn’t meant to be quite so blunt but I felt angry, awkward even.
Miana bit her lip. She looked frightened but determined. She reached for the dress ties at her side.
“Stop,” I said. I’ve never liked being pushed. Not in any direction. Miana looked well enough, and twelve isn’t so young. I was killing at twelve. But some women bloom early and some late. She may have had the mind of a she-pirate but she looked like a child.
“You don’t want me?” She faltered. Now she added hurt and angry to frightened and determined.
I’ve observed on the road that it’s old men who like young girls. Brother Row and Brother Liar would chase the young ones. Younger than Miana. Brother Sim and I had always admired experience. The fuller form. So, no, I didn’t want her. And being told to have something you don’t want, rather like being told to eat spiced squid when what you want is beef and potatoes, will kill your appetite. Any kind of appetite.