Prince of Thorns

35

“We should have seen something by now,” Makin said.

I looked back over my shoulder. The ugly bulk of Mount Honas made a black fist against the sky, the Castle Red cradled in its grip. Behind us the brothers straggled, a line of vagabonds labouring down the slope.

“This death walks softly, Makin,” I said. “An invisible hand with fatal fingers.” I gave him a grin.

“Finding every baby in its crib?” Distaste thinned Makin’s thick lips.

“Would you rather it were Rike that found them, or Row?” I asked. I set a hand to his shoulder, gauntlet to breastplate, both smeared with the grey mud from our escape tunnel. He had it in his hair too, drying on black curls.

“You seem troubled of late, old friend,” I said. “The past sins weigh so heavy that you’re afraid to add more?”

I noticed that we stood nearly of a height, though Makin was a tall man. Another year’s growth and he’d be tilting his head to meet my gaze.

“Sometimes you almost fool me, you’re that good, Jorg.” He sounded weary. I could see the web of fine lines around the corners of his eyes. “We’re not old friends. A little over three years ago you were ten. Ten! Maybe we’re friends, I can’t tell, but ‘old’? No.”

“And what is it that I’m so good at?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Playing a role. Filling in for lost years with that intuition of yours. Replacing experience with genius.”

“You think I have to be old to think with an old head?” I asked.

“I think you need to have lived more to truly know a man’s heart. You need to have made more transactions in life to know the worth of the coin you spend so freely.” Makin turned to watch the column close on us.

Rike came into view at the rear of the line, cresting a ridge, black against a dawn-pale sky. Behind him the clouds ran out in ribbons, the dirty purple of a fresh bruise, reaching for the west. Bandages on his upper arm, and around his brow, flapped in the breeze.

Something tickled at me, the ghosts of whispers, colder than the wind.

Makin turned to go.

“Wait-”

Screams now. The terror of those already dead.

No sound came, but Mount Honas lifted, like a giant drawing breath. A light woke beneath the rock, bleeding incandescence through spreading fissures. In one moment, the mountain vanished, thrown at heaven in a spiralling inferno. And, somewhere within that gyre, every stone of the Castle Red, from deepest vault to tower high.

A brilliance took all glory from the morning, making a pale wash of the land. Rike became a flicker of shadow against the blinding sky. I felt the hot kiss of that distant fury, like sunburn on my cheeks.

What burns so bright cannot endure. The light failed, leaving us in shadow, the kind of darkness that precedes a squall. I saw the storm’s outriders, newborn ghosts, driven before the rage. I watched them sweep out across the land, like the ripple from a pond-thrown stone, a grey ring where rock became dust, racing fast as thought. The sky rippled too, the ribbon-cloud now whips for the cracking.

“Dear Jesu.” Makin left his mouth open, though he had no more words.

“Run!” Burlow’s shout sounded oddly mute.

“Why?” I spread my arms to welcome the destruction. We had nowhere to run.

I watched the brothers fall. Time ran slow and the blood pulsed cold in my veins. Between two beats of my heart, the blast cut them all down, Rike first, lost beneath the grey maelstrom, a child before an ocean breaker. The hot wind took my feet. I felt the dead flow through me, and tasted the bitter gall of necromancer blood once more.

For a time I floated, like smoke above the slaughter.

I lay in nothing. I knew nothing. A peace deeper than sleep, until

…

“Oh! Bravo!” The voice cut into me, too close, and somehow familiar. “Now is the winter of our Hundred War made fearsome summer by this prodigal son.” His words flowed like rhyme, and carried strange accents.

“You maul Shakespeare worse than you abuse his mother tongue, Saracen.” This a woman, velvet and rich.

Just run.

“He has woken a Builders’ Sun, and you make jokes?” A child spoke, a girl.

“You’re not dead yet, child? With the mountain levelled into the valley?” The woman sounded disappointed.

“Forget the girl, Chella. Tell me who stands behind this boy. Has Corion grown weary of Count Renar and taken a new piece to the board? Or has the Silent Sister shown her hand at last?”

Sageous! I knew him.

“She thinks to win the game with this half-grown child?” The woman laughed.

And I knew her too. The necromancer.

“I sent you to Hell, with the Nuban’s bolt through your heart, bitch,” I said.

“What in Kali’s n-”

“He hears us?” She cut across him, Chella, I knew her voice, the only corpse ever to make me rise.

I hunted for them, there in the smoke.

“No, it’s not possible,” Sageous said. “Who stands behind you, boy?”

I could find nothing in the swirl of blindness enfolding me.

“Jorg?” A whisper at my ear. The girl again. The monsters’ glowing child.

“Jane?” I whispered back, or thought I did, I couldn’t feel my lips or any other part of me.

“The ether doesn’t hide us,” she said. “We are the ether.”

I thought on that for a moment. “Let me see you.”

I willed it. I reached for them. “Let me see you.” Louder this time. And I painted their image on the smoke.

Chella appeared first, lean and sensual as I first met her, the coils of her body-art spiralled from etheric wisps. Sageous next. He watched me with those mild eyes of his, wider and more still than mill-pools, as I cut his form from nothing. Jane stepped out beside him, her glow faint now, a mere glimmer beneath the skin. There were others, shapes in the mist, one darker than the rest, his shape half-known, familiar. I tried to see him, poured my will into it. The Nuban came to mind, the Nuban, the glimpse of my hand on a door, and the sensation of falling into space. Deja vu. “Who lends you this power, Jorg?” Chella smiled seduction at me. She stepped around me, a panther at play.

“I took it.”

“No,” Sageous shook his head. “This game has played out too long for trickery. All the players are known. The watchers too.” He nodded toward Jane.

I ignored him, and kept my eyes on Chella. “I brought the mountain down on you.”

“And I am buried. What of it?” An edge of her true age crept into her voice.

“Pray I never dig you out,” I said.

I looked to Jane. “So you’re buried too?”

For a moment her glow flickered, and I saw another Jane in her place, this one a broken thing. A rag doll held between shards of rock in some dark place where she alone gave light. Bones stood from her hip and shoulder, very white, traced with blood, black in the faint illumination. She turned her head a fraction, and those silver eyes met mine. She flickered again, whole once more, standing before me, free and unharmed.

“I don’t understand.” But I did.

“Poor sweet Jane.” Chella circled the girl, never coming too close.

“She’ll die clean,” I said. “She’s not afraid to go. She’ll take that path you fear so much. Cling to carrion flesh and rot in the bowels of the earth if that’s where cowardice keeps you.”

Chella hissed, venom on her face, the wet flap of decay in her lungs. The smoke began to take her again, writhing around her in serpent coils.

“Kill this one slow, Saracen.” She threw Sageous a hard look. And she was gone.

I felt Jane at my side. The light had left her. Her skin held the colour of fine ash when the fire has taken all there is to give. She spoke in a whisper. “Look after Gog for me, and Gorgoth. They’re the last of the leucrota.”

The thought of Gorgoth needing a guardian brought sharp words to the tip of my tongue, but I swallowed them. “I will.” Maybe I even meant it.

She took my hand. “You can win the victories you seek, Jorg. But only if you find better reasons to want them.” I felt a tingle of her power through my fingers. “Look to the lost years, Jorg. Look to the hand upon your shoulder. The strings that lead you…”

Her grip fell away, and smoke coiled where she had been.

“Don’t come home again, Prince Jorg.” Sageous made his threat sound like fatherly advice.

“If you start running now,” I said, “I might not catch you.”

“Corion?” He looked into the coiling ether behind me. “Don’t send this boy against me. It would go ill.”

I reached for my sword, but he’d gone before I cleared scabbard. The smoke became bitter, catching at my throat, and I found myself coughing.

“He’s coming round.” I heard Makin’s voice as if from a great distance.

“Give him more water.” I recognized Elban’s lisp.

I struggled up, choking and spitting water. “God’s whore!”

A vast cloud, like the anvil of a thunderhead, stood where Mount Honas had been.

I blinked and let Makin haul me to my feet. “You’re not the only one to take a hard knock.” He nodded across to where Gorgoth crouched a few yards off, with his back to us.

I stumbled over, stopping when I noticed the heat-the heat and a glow that made a silhouette of Gorgoth despite the daylight, as if he were huddled over a fierce campfire. I edged around and to the side. Gog lay coiled like a babe in the womb, every inch of him white hot, as if the light of the Builders’ Sun were bleeding through him. Even Gorgoth had to shuffle back.

As I watched, the boy’s skin shaded down through colours seen in iron in the forge, hot orange, then the duller reds. I took a step toward him and he opened his eyes, white holes into the centre of a sun. He gasped, the inside of his mouth molten, then curled more tightly. At times fire danced across his back, running along his arms, then guttering out. It took ten minutes for Gog to cool so that his old colours returned and a man could stand beside him.

At last he lifted his head and grinned. “More!”

“You’ve had enough, lad,” I said. I didn’t know what the Builders’ Sun had woken as it echoed through him, but from what I’d seen, better it went back to sleep.

I looked back at the cloud still rising above Mount Honas and the countryside burning for miles around.

“I think it’s time to go home, lads.”