King of Thorns

31

Four years earlier

I stood up sharp enough, beating Makin out of his rocker. “Ladies, my thanks but we have to leave.”

“We?” the mother asked from the kitchen doorway, half-scarlet like her daughter but on the left rather than the right, as if together they might make an untouched woman and a wholly scalded one.

“There’s only you, Jorg,” Ruth said, the side of her face starting to blister and weep. “There’s only ever been you for us.” She spat two teeth-incisors, one upper, one lower-making a slot in her smile.

Makin slipped past me, out into the mist. I backed after him, sword held ready to ward the women off. Ruth’s smile held my gaze and I forgot her child. He clamped himself to my leg, the skin falling off him like wet paper. “Who’re you? Who’re you, mister?”

“Only you, Jorg,” said the mother, her head bald now but for random white tufts. “Since the sun came.” She lifted her hand to the window.

The mist lit with a yellow glow then shrivelled back, drawn across the marsh as if it were a tablecloth whipped away fast enough to leave everything in place.

Out across the marsh it seemed that a second sun rose, too terrible and too bright to look at, too awful to look away from. A Builders’ Sun.

In horrible unison both women started to scream. Ruth’s hair burst into flame. Her mother’s scalp smouldered. I shook Jamie from my leg and he crashed against the wall, pieces of his skin left adhering to my leggings. I backed away from the house. I recognized the screams. I had made the same sounds when Gog burned me. Justice made those screams when Father lit him up.

Once upon a time perhaps I might have thought two women running around on fire was a free show. Rike would laugh that laugh of his even now. Row would bet on which one would fall first. But of late my old tastes had gone sour. I had grown to understand this kind of pain. And whatever enchantments might have staged this show for me, these people had felt real. They had felt kind. A truth ran through this lie and I didn’t like it.

Outside the sun shone, watching us from a midmorning angle, and the screams sounded fainter, farther off.

“The hell?” Red Kent swung his head. “Where’d the mist go?”

“Ain’t that a thing.” Row spat.

The buildings dripped with mud. They looked rotted. The roofs were gone.

“What did you see in there, Makin?” I asked, watching the doorway. No fire. No smoke. It looked dark. As if the sun wasn’t reaching in even though the roof had gone.

He shook his head.

“They’re sinking,” Rike said.

I could see it. Inch by inch each of the houses sunk into the foulness of the marsh. The sound of it put me in mind of sex though nothing had been more distant from my thoughts.

“They’re going back,” Sim said. He kept his distance from the walls.

He had it right. If we were seeing true now the mist had gone, then those buildings sunk long ago and something had made the marsh vomit them up again just for us.

“What happened?” Makin asked, although his face said he’d rather not know.

“They were ghosts,” I said. “Summoned for my benefit.” Some tortured re-enactment of the suffering at Gelleth. People who died because of me. “They can’t hurt us.”

Within minutes the buildings were swallowed and no trace remained above the mud. I scanned the horizon. Nothing but stagnant pools for mile after mile. The retreating mist had cleared more than my sight though. A second veil had been drawn away. A more subtle kind of mist that had been with us since we first scented the marsh. The necromancy tingled in me. We stood on the surface of an ocean and the dead swam below. Something had been overwriting my power, blinding me. Something or someone.

“Show yourself, Chella!” I shouted.

The weight of her necromancy pulled me around to stare at the mire where she rose. She emerged by degrees, black slime sliding from her nakedness, her hair plastered around her shoulders, over the tops of her breasts. Ten yards of dark and treacherous mud stood between us. Row had his bow across his back, the Nuban’s bow lay strapped to Brath’s saddle. Grumlow at least had a dagger in hand. In both hands actually. But he didn’t seem tempted to throw either. Perhaps he just didn’t want to draw her attention to him.

None of us spoke. Not one of us reached for a bow. The necromancer had a magic to work on the living as well as the dead. Or at least a magic to work on men. The mire had tainted the flesh that I remembered so well, leaving it dark but still firm. The slime that ran from her, that dripped and clung, seemed to guide the eye, to gild each dark curve and point.

“Hello, Jorg,” she said.

She used Katherine’s words from the graveyard. Maybe what is spoken in such places is always heard by those who have married Death.

“You remember me.” I wondered how long she had been leading me to this point. I had no doubt now that her creatures had torn down the bridge we hoped to cross.

“I remember you,” she said. “And the marsh remembers you. Marshes have long memories, Jorg, they suck down secrets and hold them close, but in the end, in the end, all things surface.”

I thought of the box at my hip and of the memories it held. “I suppose you’ve come to tell me not to stand against the Prince of Arrow?”

“Why? Do you think I have my hooks in him?”

I shook my head. “I would have smelled you on him.”

“You didn’t smell me here and this place reeks of death,” she said, always moving, slow gyrations and stretches, demanding the eye.

“To be fair, it reeks of so much more beside.”

“The Prince of Arrow has enough defenders, enough champions, he doesn’t need me. In any case, you don’t want to believe everything you read, and the older a book is the less reliable its stories.”

There were written prophecies too? That made me snarl. It was bad enough that every turn of the tarot card and toss of the rune sticks put Arrow on the throne. Now books, my oldest friends, had turned traitor. “So why are we here?” I asked. I knew, but I asked in any case.

“I’m here for you, Jorg,” she said, husky and seductive.

“Come and take me, Chella,” I said. I didn’t lift my sword but I turned it so the reflected light slid across her face. I didn’t ask what it was she wanted. Revenge doesn’t need explanation. “And how are you here?” A mountain had fallen on her in Gelleth and buried her deeper than deep.

She frowned at that. “The Dead King came for me.” And for a moment, just a moment, I swear I saw her shudder.

“The Dead King.” This was new. I had thought I understood-that she was after revenge, pure and simple, emotions I could appreciate. After all, I had dropped Mount Honas on her. “Did he send you?”

“I would have come anyway, Jorg. We have unfinished business.” Again the seduction, stilling the Brothers who had started to move.

“So who wants me more, Chella? You or this king of yours?”

A hint of a snarl in Chella now, the Brothers starting to shake her influence as irritation wore it thin.

“Or did he want me more than he wanted you, Chella? Is that it? Your new king only dug you up to find me for him?” I showed her my best smile. I had the truth of it: she couldn’t hide the annoyance that flickered across her brow. All to the good, an angry enemy is the best kind to have, but why this Dead King should have taken against me so I’d no idea.

“Come and take me.” I invited her again, beckoning, hoping to goad her into range. With my free hand I shoved Makin. “I know there’s a naked woman and everything, but if you could point the Brothers in more useful directions then we’re less likely to be eaten by her friends.”

“Come and take you?” Chella smiled, composure returned. She wiped her hand across her mouth, flicking mud aside, her lips blood-red. “I do want you. I do. But not for breaking. I know your heart, Jorg. Join with me. We can be more than flesh.”

The creature put an ache in my groin, true enough, as if that line between lust and revulsion had been erased as completely as the village. Part of me wanted to take her dare. Embrace what you fear, I had told Gog. Hunt your fears. And what is death if not the ultimate of fears, the final enemy? I had eaten the cold heart of a necromancer. Perhaps I should take Chella, take death by the throat, and make it serve me. I thought of the women burning in their house. “You are less than flesh,” I said.

“Cruel words.” She smiled. She stepped closer. The fluid motion of her held my eyes. The jounce of breasts, the jut of hips, the redness of her mouth. “There’s a magic between us, Jorg. Surely you must have felt it? Does it not echo in your chest? Doesn’t it underwrite the very beating of your heart, dear one? We were meant to be together. The Dead King has told me I can have you. Told me to bring you to him. And I will.”

“You’ll have a long wait for me in hell,” I said. “Because I intend to send you there right now.” A weak line perhaps but mention of the Dead King knocked me out of my stride.

She smiled and made a kiss with crimson lips. “Are you angry because I showed you your ghosts? It wasn’t me who made them, Jorg.”

That stole the certainty from me. I saw Ruth again, and her mother, scalded by the hot light of the Builders’ Sun. “I didn’t know-”

“You didn’t know a sun would burn them. You thought a cloud of poison would roll out and devastate the land. Isn’t that right? So, if Ruth and her mother and her child were choking on their own intestines, bleeding from eyes and anus, screaming different screams, that would be all right? That would be fine because that was the plan?” Chella stepped closer. Relentless.

I couldn’t answer that. I had thought to poison the Castle Red, and I had known it would be everyone in it, not just the warriors. And if the toxins had spread? I had no idea how far they might go. And I hadn’t cared.

“You know what men are really afraid of, Chella?” I asked.

“Tell me.” She ran her hands up her thighs, across her belly, smearing dark skin with darker mud.

Makin pressed the Nuban’s bow into my palm. I grasped it. The thing nearly too heavy to hold in one hand.

“Men are afraid of dying. Not of death. Men want it to be quick, clean. That’s the worst thing, the wound that lets you linger. Ain’t that right, Makin?”

“Yes,” he said. Makin isn’t a man of few words, but it’s difficult to break into a necromancer’s spell.

“Linger,” I said. “That’s a word that frightens the Brothers. Don’t let me linger, they say. And you know what undeath is, Chella? It’s the ultimate in lingering. A coward dies a thousand times, the Bard told us. And what about you? You’ve died just once but you’ve lingered a thousand times longer than you should.”

“Don’t mock me, child,” Chella said. Her ribs stood out now, her cheeks hollowed. “I hold more power-”

“You can show me my ghosts, Chella. You can try to scare me with death and with dead things, so that I’ll choose your path. But I have my own road to follow. My ghosts are my own and I will deal with them alone. You are a thing of rot and fear and you should find a grave that will take you.”

The time when nothing could put fear in me had passed. It seems terror is a companion in the soft years when everything is new, and returns to us with age, as we acquire things to lose. Perhaps I didn’t have my full share of old man’s cowardice just yet, but Gelleth’s ghosts and knowing how many dead things swam beneath the mud, ready for the necromancer’s call, had set a coldness in my bones. I had a prince to defeat, perhaps Katherine to woo, a comfortable throne to warm. Being drowned in slime by dead men didn’t fit into those plans.

“It wasn’t just ghosts I brought with me from Gelleth, Jorg.” Chella raised her arms high, a languid motion.

Other forms started to emerge from the mire, human forms.

I stuck my sword into the ground and lifted the Nuban’s bow.

“I’ve been collecting,” Chella said.

The shape rising in front of her held familiar lines, a broad and powerful build, darkest in the places where the mud lay thin. A hole in his chest.

“I think he wants his bow back,” Chella said.

To her left a bloated form, guts hanging like black sausage from his slit belly. Others around us, clawing and shaking the mud from their faces. One stood head and shoulders above the rest, flesh hanging from his bones in tatters.

“I’ve walked where you walked, Jorg, taken what you tried to burn, and dug where you buried. Even in the shadow of your walls.”

I knew them all. The Nuban between Chella and my bow…his bow, Fat Burlow to her left. Gemt with patches of dull red hair showing through the muck, head stitched back on, Brother Gains, Brother Jobe, Brother Roddat. Old Elban who always prayed for a quiet grave, Liar whose body we never found to bury even though he fell at the Haunt, and Brother Price all bones and tatters from four years in the ground. And more rising in the deep mire or hauling themselves onto firmer ground from the standing pools.

Chella watched me over the Nuban’s shoulder, using him as her shield. Another lesson in the value of attacking without hesitation.

“Join with me.” Her voice fluttered from corrupt lungs. Her eyes glittered, sunken in their sockets as if lifting my Brothers from the depths had sucked vitality from her. “My brother’s strength runs in you, all but unused, fading, wasted.”

Brother? The necromancer I cut down was her brother?

“My thanks, lady, but I’ve had my fill of necromancers.” I fired both bolts from the Nuban’s bow. One punched a hole in his shoulder. The other passed through Chella’s neck just to one side of her throat.

The Nuban, almost turned around by the impact, straightened and faced me again, no expression on his grey lips. Chella put a hand to her neck and twisted her head with a noise like popping cartilage.

“We’re family, Jorg. Families argue. But I forgive you, and when I’ve taken you down into the marsh with me…when we’re together in the cold deep places…embracing like family do…you’ll forgive me too.”

Brother Sim holds himself close and you will never know him no matter what words pass between you. He whispers something to each man he kills. If he could speak it to a man and let him live, then I might have lost a killer.