Prince of Thorns

32

We ascended the Great Stair with the screams of ghosts rising beneath us. They say fear lends a man wings. None of the brothers flew up the Stair, but the way they scrambled over the slickness of that rocky throat would teach a lizard plenty about climbing.

I let them lead the way. It was as good a means as any to test the footing. Grumlow first, then Liar and young Sim. Gog scrambled behind them, followed by Gorgoth. I guessed the leucrotas’ accord with the necromancers might be somewhat broken.

Makin was the last of them. He could feel the dead coming. I saw it in the pallor of his skin. He looked like a dead thing himself.

“Jorg! Get up here! Climb!” He grabbed at my arm as he passed.

I shook him off. I could see ghosts boiling along the tunnel toward us, others stepping from the walls.

“Jorg!” Makin took my shoulders and pulled me toward the Stair.

He couldn’t see them. I knew from the wild sweep of his gaze. His eyes never touched them. The closest of them looked to me like chalk drawings half-erased, hanging in the air. Sketches of corpses, some naked, some clad in rags, or pieces of broken armour. A coldness came from them, reaching for my flesh, stealing warmth with invisible fingers.

I laughed at them. Not because I thought they had no power to harm me, but because they had. I laughed to show them what I cared for their threat. I laughed to hurt them. And they suffered for it. The taste of dead heart-meat lingered at the back of my throat, and a dark power ran through me.

“Die!” I shouted at them, spitting away the laughter. “A man should at least know how to stay dead!”

And they did. I think. As if my words held them to obey. Makin had me dragged away, nearly round the corner, but I saw the spirits stop. I saw pale flames light upon their limbs, the ghost of fire. And, oh, the screaming. Even Makin heard it, like the scrape of nails on slate, cold wind on a migraine. We both ran then, close enough to flying.

It was hours before we stopped, a thousand feet or more up the Stair. The downward tumble of the long-vanished river paused here to scour out a bowl, set about with smaller sinkholes and decorated with the frozen tracery of stone that graces the deep places of the world.

“Fuckit.” Fat Burlow collapsed in a boneless heap and lay motionless.

Red Kent sat back against a stalagmite, his face coloured to match his name.

Close by, Elban spat into a sinkhole pool, then turned, wiping mucus from his wizened lips. “Heh! You looks like one o’ them Blushers, Kent.”

Kent just gave him mean eyes.

“So.” Makin hauled in a huge breath and tried again. “So, Prince, we’re climbing up. Well and good. But if we keep on up we’re just going to reach the Castle Red.” Another breath. A long climb in armour will do that for you. “We might surprise the hell out of them, coming up out of their vaults, but we’re still twice a dozen men against nine hundred.”

I smiled. “It’s a dilemma ain’t it, Brother Makin? Can Jorg work the magic one more time?”

The brothers all had an eye on me now. All save Burlow, after that climb he wouldn’t turn his head for anything less than the Second Coming.

I pulled myself to my feet and gave a little bow. “That Jorg, that Prince Jorg, he’s got a madness in him. A stranger to reason, a little in love with death perhaps?”

Makin had a frown on him, worried, wanting me to shut up.

I strode around them. “Young Jorg, he’s apt to throw it all away on a whim, gamble the brotherhood on wild chance… but somehow, just somehow, it keeps turning out a-right!”

I clapped a hand to Rike’s greasy head and he gave me a bruise-faced scowl.

“Is it luck?” I asked. “Or some sort of royal magic?”

“Nine hundred o’ them Blushers up there in the Castle Red, Jorth.” Elban gestured at the ceiling with his thumb. “No way we can turn them out of there. Not if we were ten times the number.”

“The wisdom of age!” And I crossed to Elban and threw an arm around his shoulders. “Oh my brothers! I may have given our priest away, but it sorrows me that your faith departs so swiftly on his heels.”

I steered Elban to the Stair. I felt the tension in him as we neared the point where the floor fell away. He remembered the Watch Master.

I pointed up the stepped river course. “That’s where our path lies, Old Father.”

I let him go and he drew in a sigh. Then I turned to face the brothers once again. Gorgoth watched me with his cat’s eyes, Gog with strange fascination from behind a pillar of rock.

“Now I’m thinking that I’ll find what I’m looking for before we reach the under-vaults of the Castle Red.” I put a little iron in my voice. “But if it turns out we have to murder us a quiet path to Duke Merl’s bedchamber, and I have to plant him on my sword like a puppet on a stick to get him to sign the place over to me…” I swept my gaze across them, and even Burlow managed to look up. “Then…” I let my voice fill the chamber and it echoed marvellously. “Then that is what you will fecking well do, and the first brother that doubts my fecking luck, will be the first to leave this little family of ours.” I left them in no doubt that such a parting would be ungentle.

So we climbed again, and in time we left the Great Stair behind us, finding once more the box-halls of the Builders. Gorgoth’s knowledge reached only to the Stair’s foot so I led the way. Lines danced in my mind. Rectangles, squares, precise corridors, all etched into scorched plasteek. A turn there, a chamber on the left. And with sudden certainty, like one of Lundist’s potions turning to crystal at the addition of the smallest grain, I knew where we were.

I pictured the map and followed it. The Builders’ book sat in my pack, and I’d returned to its pages many times on our journey from The Falling Angel. No need to dig it out now. Let the brothers have their magic show.

We came to a five-way intersection. I put one hand to my forehead and let the other wander the air as if seeking our path. “This way! We’re close.”

An opening on the left, edged by the ancient rust-stain of a long vanished door.

I paused and lit a new torch of tar and bone from the blackened stick of my old one.

“And here we are!”

With my best courtly flourish I pointed the way, then stepped through.

We entered an antechamber to the vault I sought from my map. The door that blocked the way from our chamber into the vault stood maybe ten foot tall, a huge circular valve of gleaming steel, set about with rivets thick as my arm. Damned if I know what Builder spells kept it from rusting away like the rest, but there it was, big, shiny, and implacably in my way.

“So how’re you going to open that?” Rike’s words came out mumbled. I’d mashed his lips up pretty good.

I hadn’t the slightest idea.

“I thought we could try knocking it down with your head.”

I named him Liar the day I put a knife through his hand. The knife came out, but the name stuck. He was a mean bit of gristle wrapped round bone. Truth might burn his tongue but his looks didn’t lie.