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.
The Prince’s troops passed Rigden Rock, a spear flew by my head.
“Come to me,” I said, “Brother Gog.”
“Truly?” he asked. “There will be no end to this—like the sun beneath the mountain.”
A million images tumbled through me. Faces, moments, places, brothers of every kind. The weariness of the world. And the fire consumed it. I knew then how Ferrakind felt.
“Let it all burn.”
And Gog flowed into me. A river of fire, eating the death-magic and making something new, a darker fire that ran like poison, coiling about my limbs.
The first of Egan’s army reached me and the fire lifted from my hands. The men shredded, their flesh lifting from them as sea foam before a wind, their bones igniting as they fell. The dark-fire ran, jumping from man to man as the soldiers tried to flee, tried to turn and run, only to find their comrades not yet understanding, surging forward.
I walked amongst them and death walked with me.
Death and fire. Ferrakind howled at me from the place where fire lives, a song of destruction, stripping away what makes me. Ferrakind and every other lost to flame, all one now, fused, screaming for me to join them. And in the dry place into which the dead fall, other voices, just as compelling, implacable. The Dead King reached for me, along the paths through which necromancy flowed into my core, flooding me. These two among the many, both of them fought to claim me, dogs over a bone. And while they fought death and flame blossomed about me in conflagration, and men died, in tens, in scores, in hundreds, in stinking, steaming, screaming heaps.
49
Wedding day
The warrior rides a black stallion. Smoke shrouds the castle ruins behind him and the wind gives only glimpses of the corpse-choked gap between high and broken walls. That same wind streams long dark hair across his shoulders, like a pennant, and flutters the remnants of his cloak. To his left and right more riders emerge from the fog of war, warriors all, their armour dented, torn, smeared with soot and blood. A huge soldier in battered plate-mail carries the standard, Ancrath’s boar in black upon the red field of Renar. They come by ones and twos, slow in their motion as if the great distance from which they are seen has somehow robbed the urgency from their movement. Each hoof lands with the finality of tomb doors closing, no sound to accompany the action. Each bounce and jolt in the saddle takes an age.
Where the baked dirt flakes from the warrior’s plate armour the metal shows the rainbowed hues of oiled steel. Beside him an older, dark-haired knight, half a smile on thick-lips, black curls plastered to his forehead, an eagle’s head on his round shield, worked in red copper, fire-bronze, and silver, broadsword at his hip, black iron flail secured to his saddle. A second man in plate-mail on a white charger rides to their left, at home in his saddle as any sea-dog on a rolling deck. His armour is worked with the gothic engravings of the Horse Coast, his cloak blue in memory of the sea, on his jousting shield the white ship and black sun of the House Morrow.
A priest follows them, perched uneasy on a fractious mule. The wind throws wisps of grey hair across his scowl.
The man at the centre, at the arrowpoint of this emerging army, stares straight ahead. A wolf skull hangs from the pommel of his saddle. A wolf or a large hound. The man’s face is scarred, the left side rough and twisted, as if the sculptor had heard the work bell and left in mid-action, leaving his creation unfinished. Over one eye, fixed to the bossed rim and side of his helm by iron rivets, is a silver ring, big enough to rest against his eyebrow and cheekbone. If you knew the edge were ridged you might imagine you could see those ridges, but they are a prisoner of the distance between us, as is any message in that thousand-yard stare.
I got bored with watching myself and flipped the ring up so my view lay unobstructed.
They had found me naked, every item on me seemingly burned away, except for my sword on which flames still danced. That fire held to the blade for hours and even now from time to time I see reflections of flames in the steel. I’ve named my first sword. I call it Gog, though I think it holds only an echo of him, like that echo of Fexler Brews, a man who shot himself in a stasis chamber long ago with a Colt 45. The world turned, he said. And it left him behind.
I had opened my eyes as Makin wrapped me in his cloak. The wound on my chest was just pink edges and white seams—the fire burned every trace of the necromancer from me, and in the end, as it failed, that death quenched Gog. I felt the absence of both, like holes in the world. Gog is ended. I won’t see him again.
The fire has left me for it was always his, never mine, and the necromancy too. I may have clothes and armour now, but I am naked against the world once more, with nothing but the sharp wit, tongue, and blade of the Ancraths to see me through.
I think if they had not fought each other over me, Ferrakind and the Dead King, if either had his sole attention on me as I opened myself to their realms and let those places burst through me in such reckless abandon, I would have been claimed. Such powers can’t be mastered, not without cost, and that cost would seem to include losing all those reasons you wanted that strength for. And it is a sacrifice I would have paid in the moment, with the arms of thousands raised against me. In the end, my brothers, there is no price I will not pay to win this game of ours. No sacrifice too great that it will not be paid to stop another placing their will over mine.
We ride for Arrow. I feel they owe me a castle at the very least. A palace might be nice too. And all those dead soothsayers and seers of the future—we’re friends now. I am the Prince of Arrow. Ask Father Gomst. He was there, looking whilst God turned away. Egan adopted me into his family. And he’s dead now. Not at my hand, but trampled by his own men. So, I’m the Prince of Arrow, homeward bound, destined by right and vision to be the emperor and to sit upon that golden throne beyond the Gilden Gate.
We ride for Arrow, an avalanche that thunders from the Highlands. This world will bend to my dominion. The box is open, its memories free, old wickedness and sins loosed once more. I am not that boy, the wild boy on the edge of manhood who filled it. He stands in my past and soon the curvature of the earth will hide him as the years carry us apart. I am not that boy and his crimes don’t stain my hands. I’m riding for Arrow. I will delve shoulder-deep in gore if the need arises, so deep no river could scour me clean though they cut through mountains. My dreams are my own now, dark and pure. If you would know them, Brother, stand in my way.
I told Sageous my sins cried out for more, and I intend to give them company. I will burn and I will harrow and Orrin’s lands, Egan’s blood-stained inheritance, will be delivered into my hands. I will stand King of Arrow, of Normardy, of Conaught, of Belpan, of the Ken Marshes, of Orlanth, and of the Renar Highlands. I will take these lands and make a weapon of their peoples. In fire and in blood I will bend them to my will, because this is a game with no rules, and I will be victorious if it beggars hell.
I write this as we camp after a hard day’s riding. I make a crabbed hand across pages as white as gold can buy. Perhaps they were destined for more worthy thoughts, but I set mine here. Sageous wrote his words across his skin and it left him weak. My father keeps them to himself and it leaves him less than human. I write mine here, as if ink and paper can take the blame from me. The surgeons like to bleed a man, to let ill humours out, so that he may face the world anew. Perhaps they should just hand him a quill and let the poisons spill from him whilst he keep
s his blood for its intended purpose.
Beside my pages are Katherine’s, scavenged from the ruination below Rigden Rock. I saw her burn. I saw her among the flames, her horse screaming. Or was that a dream in the darkness that followed? In any event the wind scattered her words across the dead and I followed them to the corpse of a baggage mule. I said once, these feelings are too fierce to last. They can only burn. Make us ash and char. And we burned, both of us—but still I want her. Though if she stood here now, she would only hate me and pride would edge my tongue to cut her in return.
Pride has ever been my weakness and my strength, but there are three things only of which I’m proud. The first—I climbed God’s finger to stand alone in that high place and find a new perspective. Second—I went to the mountain for Gog, even though I couldn’t save him from his fire, just as no one can save me from mine. Third—I fought the all-sword, Master Shimon with the sword-song all around, and we made a thing of beauty.
There will be pride to come, enough to drown in, but perhaps there will be no more things of which to be proud.
A time of terror comes. A dark time. The graves continue to open and the Dead King prepares to sail. But the world holds worse things than dead men. A dark time comes.
My time.
If it offends you.
Stop me.
King of Thorns Page 41