Emperor of Thorns

12

Five years earlier

Carrod Springs stinks. Not a human stink of waste and rot but a chemical offence against the senses, the bad-egg stench of sulphur, combined with sharper aromas fit for turning eyes red and stripping the lining from your nose.

‘You see now why the trail detours so far to approach from the west with the prevailing wind,’ Lesha said.

‘Why would anyone live here?’ Sunny asked.

A fair question. True enough, water had become a rarity as we trekked north into the wasteland, but the stuff that bubbled up in Carrod Springs could surely not be potable. It had risen hot and steaming from the earth’s bowels. And smelled like it.

The settlement, seven shacks and two storage barns, clustered on a rise to the west, a spot where the breeze would offer a clean lungful. If there ever was any breeze. The buildings looked frost-rimed but drawing closer you could see it for what it was: salt, caked to the wood, bearding the eaves. We passed the first barn, doors wide, mounds of salt on display, like grain heaped from the harvest, some piles white, some grey, at the back rusty orange, and to the left-side smaller heaps of a deep but faint blue.

Balky had to be encouraged with a stick. None of the animals wanted to be here. They licked their muzzles, spat, and licked again. I could taste it on my lips too, like the salt spray off the ocean but sharper and more penetrating. My hands felt dry as if the skin on them had died and gone to parchment.

We tied the horses and Lesha led us to one of the smallest shacks — I had taken it to be a privy. A handful of residents watched us from their doorways, all of them veiled, salt crusted on the cloth where they drew breath. One had a huge goitre that wrapped his neck in throttling folds of mottled flesh. At the shack, Lesha knocked and entered. Sunny and I stood by the doorway peering into the gloom. It seemed unlikely we would all fit inside.

‘Lesha.’ A figure, seated in the far corner, nodding to her.

‘Toltech.’ She crouched before him.

Toltech watched her with bright eyes over the top of his veil. He worked the mortar and pestle in his hands all the while, grinding away.

‘You’re going back in?’ He didn’t sound surprised.

‘Three of us, with three beasts. We’ll need pills for a week.’

‘A week is a long time in the Iberico.’ Toltech glanced to me then to Sunny. ‘An hour can be a long time there.’

‘If it takes us an hour, we’ll be there an hour,’ Lesha said.

Toltech put down his pestle and reached across to a low shelf. He picked up a bowl filled with small wraps of greased paper, tightly bound. Scars ran along his hand. The same molten scars that covered Lesha.

‘Take one at sunrise, one at sunset. Swallow them in the paper if you can. The salt steals any moisture in the air and dissolves in it, so these will not last long anywhere damp. Take a hundred. Five silver.’

The right salts helped keep out the sickness caused by the echoes of the Builders’ fire. Nobody knew why. The required salts could be separated from the waters of Carrod Springs with sufficient expertise. Five pieces of silver seemed a small price to pay. I counted out the coins, one stamped with my grandfather’s head, and passed them in to Lesha.

Toltech started to count salt pills into a cotton bag. ‘If you find anything in the hills, even if it’s just broken pieces, bring it to me. I might give you your silver back.’

‘What have you had from the Iberico before, Master Toltech?’ I asked. ‘I’m something of a collector myself.’ I leaned a little way in through the entrance. Beneath the salts’ astringency the smell of sickness caught at me.

‘Small things.’ He pointed at two short bottles of green glass on the shelf where the bowl had rested. Beside them a tray covered with pieces of fractured plasteek in many colours and shapes. From behind him he took a great cog of silvery metal, stained with age. It looked like an enormous cousin to one of the minute pieces from inside the watch in my baggage. ‘Nothing of great consequence. The best I sell on.’

‘And do you know about the Builders, Master Toltech? Do you learn their secrets as you sift through their leavings?’ I asked.

‘I know only what all of us here know about the Builders. What our fathers knew.’

‘And that is?’ Some men like to be prompted.

‘That they are not gone, and that you cannot trust them.’

We camped that night on the very edge of the Iberico range where a poisoned stream named the Cuyahoga ran out across the badlands. I swallowed my salt pill, the bitterness escaping despite its wrap of paper. Toltech had had no more to say about the Builders so as we settled down after sunset I quizzed Lesha.

‘What does your friend mean when he says the Builders are not gone?’

I felt rather than saw her shrug. We lay close, despite the weight of heat upon us. ‘Some say the Builders are spirits now, all around us, written into the elements.’

‘Not just echoes in machines?’ I thought of Fexler flickering into life as I came down the cellar steps.

Lesha lifted to face me, frowning, deep enough that her scars buckled into furrows. ‘Machines? Things of wheels and pulleys? I don’t understand.’

‘Spirits you say?’ I decided to keep the engines beneath my grandfather’s castle to myself. ‘Good spirits or evil ones?’

Again the shrug. ‘Just spirits. In the air, in rocks, running through rivers and streams, even staring at you out of the fire.’

‘I heard that the Builders took hold of what is real, and before they scorched the world, they changed it,’ I said.

‘Changed what?’ I’d forgotten Sunny was even there.

‘Everything. Me, you, the world, what real is. They made the world listen a little more to what’s in men’s heads. They made thoughts and fears matter, made them able to change what’s around us.’

‘They didn’t make it listen to me.’

I smiled at Sunny’s grumbling.

‘Earl Hansa had a rock-sworn mage work for him,’ Sunny added. ‘A young fellow. Must have been ten, fifteen years ago. Arron. That was it. He could work stone with his hands as if it was butter. One time he set a finger to my sword and it got so heavy I couldn’t hold it. I couldn’t pry it off the floor until the next day.’

‘What happened to him?’ He sounded like a useful man to know, this Arron.

‘Sunk.’

‘Ah.’

‘Not at sea though. Ortens says he saw it, and Ortens isn’t one for lying. He just sunk into the floor one morning. Right out in the centre courtyard. And nobody saw him again. There’s just a grey stain where he went into the rock.’

‘Well there’s a thing,’ I said.

And we all fell silent.

I lay for a time, on my blanket on the dust, listening to the silence. Something was wrong. I groped for it, reaching like you do in the night when your knife isn’t where it should be. For the longest time I couldn’t discover what it was that irked me.

‘There’s no noise.’ I sat up.

‘What?’ Lesha, sleep edging her voice.

‘Those things, those damned cicadas that screech all night. Where are they?’

‘Not here,’ she said. ‘We’re too close. Nothing lives in the Iberico. Not rats, not bugs, not lichen on rocks. If you want to go back — now is the time.’