FOUR
Hamada is a grand city that beggars most others in the Broken Empire, though we don’t like to talk about that back in Christendom. You can only approach it from the desert so it is always welcome to the eye. It has no great walls—sand would only heap against them, providing any enemy a ramp. Instead it rises slowly from ground where hidden water has bound the dunes with karran grass. First it’s mud domes, made startlingly white with lime-wash, half-buried, their dark interiors unfathomable to the sun-blind eye. The buildings grow in stature and the ground dips toward that promised water, revealing towers and minarets and palatial edifices of white marble and pale sandstone.
Seeing the city grow before us out of the desert had silenced everyone, even stopping the talk of the Builders’ Sun, the endless whys, the circular discussions of what it all meant. There’s something magical about seeing Hamada after an age in the Sahar—and believe me, two days is an age in such a place. I was doubly grateful for the distraction since I’d been foolish enough to mention that much of Gelleth had been devastated by one of the Builders’ weapons and that I’d seen the margins of the destruction. The sheik—who obviously paid far more attention to his history lessons than I had—noted that no Builders’ Sun had ignited in over eight hundred years, which made the odds against a man being witness to two such events extremely long indeed. Only the sight of Hamada had stopped him from carrying that observation toward a conclusion in which I was somehow involved in the explosions.
“I will be glad to get off this camel.” I broke the silence. I wore the sword I had taken from Edris Dean, and the dagger I’d brought out of Hell with me, both returned on my request after the incident with the djinn. In Hamada I would swap my robes for something more fitting. With a horse under me I’d start feeling like my old self in no time!
There is a gate to the west of Hamada, flanked on each side by fifty yards of isolated wall, an archway tall enough for elephants with high, plumed howdahs on their backs. The Gate of Peace they call it and sheiks always enter the city through it, and so, with civilization tantalizingly close, our caravan turned and tracked the city’s perimeter that we might keep with tradition.
I rode near the head of the column, keeping a wary distance from Jahmeen, not wholly trusting the djinn not to find some way back into him and escape the deadlands. The only good thing about that final mile of the journey was that the last of our water was shared about, a veritable abundance of the stuff. The Ha’tari poured it down their throats, over their hands, down their chests. Me, I just drank it until my belly swelled and would take no more. Even then the thirst the deadlands had put in me was still there, parching my mouth as I swallowed the last gulp.
“What will you do, Prince Jalan?” The sheik had never once asked how I came to be in the desert, perhaps trusting it to be God’s will, proven by the truth of my prophecy and beyond understanding. He seemed interested in my future though, if not my past. “Will you stay in Liba? Come to the coast with me and I will show you my gardens. We grow more than sand in the north! Perhaps you might stay?”
“Ah. Perhaps. First though I mean to present myself at the Mathema and look up an old friend.” All I wanted to do was get home, with the key, in one piece. I doubted that the three double florins and scatter of smaller coins in my pocket would get me there. If I could ride Sheik Malik’s goodwill all the way to the coast that would be well and good— but I wondered if his approval would last the journey. In my experience it’s never that long before any ill fortune gets pinned to the outsider. How many weeks into the desert would it be before his son’s failure to recover soured the sheik and he started to look at events in a different light? How long before my role as the one who warned him of the danger twisted into painting me as the one who brought the danger?
“My business will keep me in Hamada for a month—” The sheik broke off as we approached the Gate of Peace. A twisted corpse had been tied above the archway—the strangest corpse I had seen in a while. Scraps of black cloth fluttered around the body: beneath them the victim’s skin lay whiter than a Viking’s, save for the many places where it was torn and dark with old blood. The true shock came where the limbs hung broken and the flesh, opened by sword blows, should have revealed the bone. Instead metal gleamed amid the seething mass of flies. A carrion crow set them buzzing and through the black cloud I saw silver steel, articulated at the joints.
“That’s Mechanist work,” I said, shielding my eyes for a better view as we drew nearer. “The man almost looks like a modern, from Umbertide but inside he’s . . .”
“Clockwork.” Sheik Malik halted just shy of passing beneath the arch.
The column behind us began to bunch.
“I’d swear that’s a banker.” I thought of dear old Marco Onstantos
Evenaline of the House Gold, Mercantile Derivatives South. The man had taught me to trade in prospects. For a time I had enjoyed taking part in the mad speculation governing the flow of gold through the dozen largest
Florentine banks. Banks that seemed sometimes to rule the world. I wondered if this could be him—if so, he hadn’t governed his own prospects too well. “It might even be one I’ve met.”
“That, would be hard to tell.” Sheik Malik prompted his camel forward. “True.” A dozen or more crossbow bolts appeared to have passed through the banker’s head, leaving little of his face and making a ruin of the silver-steel skull behind it. Even so, I thought of Marco, whom I’d seen last with the necromancer Edris Dean. Marco with his inhuman stillness and his projects on marrying dead flesh to clockwork. When his superior, Davario, had first called him in I had thought it had been to show me the dead hand attached to a clockwork soldier. Perhaps the joke had been that the man leading that soldier in was himself a dead man wrapped around the altered frame of a Mechanists’ creation.
The Ha’tari remained at the gate, singing their prayers for our souls, or for our righteous damnation, while the sheik’s entourage passed through. We left the ragged crowd of urchins that had followed us from the outskirts there too, only to have it replaced within yards by a throng of Hamadians of all stations, from street merchant to silk-clad prince, all clamouring for news. The sheik began to address them in the desert tongue, a rapid knifeedged language. I could see from their faces they knew that it wouldn’t be good news, but few of them would understand yet quite how bad it would be. Nobody from the gathering at the Oasis of Palms and Angels would ever pass through this gate again.
I took the opportunity to slip from my camel and weave a path through the crowd. No one saw me go, bound as they were by Sheik Malik’s report.
The city seemed almost empty. It always does. No one wishes to linger in the oven of the streets when there are cooler interiors offering shade. I passed the grand buildings, built by the wealth of caliphs past for the people of Hamada. For a place that had nothing but sand and water to its name Hamada had accumulated an awful lot of gold over the centuries.
Walking over the sand-scattered flagstones with my shadow puddled dark around my feet I could imagine it a city of ghosts, djinn-haunted and waiting for the dune-tide to drown it.
The sudden dip that reveals the lake is always a surprise. There before me lay a wide stretch of water taking the sky’s tired blue and making something azure and supple of it. The caliph’s palace sat across the lake from me, a vast central dome surrounded by minarets and a sprawl of interlinked buildings, dazzling white, galleried and cool.
I skirted the lake, passing by the steps and pillars of an ancient amphitheatre built by the men of Roma back in the days before Christ found them. The Mathema Tower stood back from the water but with an uninterrupted view, reaching for the heavens and dwarfing all other towers in Hamada, even the caliph’s own. Advancing on it gave me uncomfortable recollections of the Frauds’ Tower in Umbertide, though the Mathema stands half as broad and three times as tall.
“Welcome.” One of the black-robed students resting in the tower’s shadow stood to intercept me. The others, maybe a dozen in all, scarcely looked up from their slates, busy scratching down their calculations.
“Wa-alaykum salaam,” I returned the greeting. You’d think after all the sand I’d swallowed I would have more of the desert tongue, but no.
The exchange seemed to have exhausted both his words of Empire and mine of Araby and an awkward silence stretched between us. “This is new.” I waved at the open entrance. There had been a black crystal door there, to be opened by solving some puzzle of shifting patterns, different each time. As a student it had never taken me less than two hours to open it, and on one occasion, two days. Having no door at all now made a pleasant if unexpected change, though I had rather been looking forward to poking Loki’s key at the bastard and seeing it swing open for me immediately.
The student, a narrow-featured youngster from far-Araby, his black hair slick to his skull, frowned as if remembering some calamity. “Jorg.”
“I’m sure.” I nodded, pretending to understand. “Now, I’m going up to see Qalasadi.” I pushed past and followed the short corridor beyond to the stair that winds up just inside the outer wall. The sight of equations set into the wall and spiralling up with the stairs for hundreds of feet, just reminded me what a torture my year in Hamada had been. Not quite walking-the-deadlands level of torture, but math-ematics can come pretty close on a hot day when you’re hung over. The equations followed me up as I climbed. A master mathmagician can calculate the future, seeing as much amid the scratched summations and complex integrations on their slates as the Silent Sister sees with her blind eye or the völvas extrapolate from the dropping of their runestones. Men are just variables to the mathmagicians of Liba, and just how far the mathmagicians see and what their aims might be are secrets known only to their order.
I got about halfway up to Omega level at the top of the tower before, sweating freely, I paused to catch my breath. The four grandmasters of the order preside in turn throughout the year and I was hoping that the current incumbent would remember me, along with my connections to the Red March throne. Qalasadi was my best bet since he arranged my tuition during my stay. With any luck the mathmagicians would organize my safe passage home, perhaps even calculating me a risk-free path.
“Jalan Kendeth.” Not a question.
I turned and Yusuf Malendra filled the staircase behind me, white robes swirling, a grin gleaming black against the mocha of his face. I’d seen him last in Umbertide waiting in the foyer of House Gold.
“They say there are no coincidences with mathmagicians,” I said, wiping my forehead. “Did you calculate the place and moment of our meeting? Or was it just the end of your business in Florence that brought you back here?”
“The latter, my prince.” He looked genuinely pleased to see me. “We do of course have coincidences and this is a most happy one.” Behind him a student came puffing up the stairs.
A sudden thought struck me, the image of a white body, black clad, broken and left hanging on the Gate of Peace in the desert sun. “Marco . . . that was Marco wasn’t it?”
“I—”
“Jalan? Jalan Kendeth? I don’t believe it!” A head poked around Yusuf’s shoulder, broad, dark, a grin so wide it seemed to hang between his ears.
“Omar!” As soon as I laid eyes on the grinning face of Omar Fayed, seventh son of the caliph, I knew my ordeal was over. Omar had been among the most faithful of my companions back in Vermillion, always up for hitting the town. Not a great drinker perhaps but with a love of gambling that eclipsed even my own, and pockets deeper than any young man I ever knew. “Now tell me that this was coincidence!” I challenged Yusuf.
The mathmagician spread his hands. “You didn’t know Prince Omar had returned to Hamada and his studies at the Mathema?”
“Well . . .” I had to concede that I had known.
“They said you were dead!” Omar squeezed past Yusuf and set a hand on my shoulder. Being short, he had to reach up, which made a change after all my time standing in Snorri’s shadow. “That fire . . . I never believed them. I’ve been trying to do the sums to prove it, but, well, they’re tricky.”
“I’m glad to have saved you the effort.” I found myself answering his grin. It felt good to be back with people who knew me. A friend who cared enough to try to find out what had happened to me. After . . . however long it had been, trekking in Hell, it all felt suddenly a bit overwhelming.
“Come.” Yusuf saved me the embarrassment of blubbing on the stairs in front of them by leading the way down half a dozen steps to the door onto the Lambda level and taking us into a small room off the main corridor.
We sat down around a polished table, the room crowding around us, lined as it was with scrolls and fat tomes bound with leather. Yusuf poured three tiny cups of very strong java from a silver jug standing in the window slit.
“I need to get home,” I said, wincing as I knocked back the java. No point in beating around any bushes.
“Where have you been?” Omar, a smile still splitting his face. “You came south after escaping the fire? Why south? Why pretend to be dead?”
“I went north as it happens, in a hurry, but the point is that I’ve been . . . incommunicado . . . for a few . . . um. When is it?”
“Sorry?” Omar frowned, puzzled.
“It’s the 98th year of Interregnum, the tenth month,” Yusuf said, watching me closely.
“For . . . uh . . .” I’ll admit to a little shame, struggling with subtraction in front of a master mathmagician of the Mathema. “About, well, damn it! Months, nearly half a year!” It hadn’t been half a year, had it? On the one hand it had felt about two lifetimes, but on the other, if I considered the things that actually happened it seemed you could easily fit them into a week.
“Kelem!” I blurted the name out before deciding if that were a wise thing to do or not. “Tell me about Kelem, and the banking clans.”
“Kelem’s hold on the clans is broken.” Yusuf’s hands moved on the table top, fingers twitching as if he were struggling not to write down the terms and balance the equations with new information. “Calculations indicate that he has lost his material form.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“You don’t know?” Yusuf’s left eyebrow suggested it didn’t believe me.
I thought of Aslaug and Baraqel, remembering how Loki’s daughter raged against Kelem when I set her free, and the look of hurt in her black eyes as I let Kara drive her back into the darkness. “The Builders went into the spirit world . . .”
“Some of them did,” Yusuf said. “A small number. They used the changes they wrought in the world when they turned the Wheel. They escaped into other forms when their flesh betrayed them. Others were copied into the Builders’ machines and exist there now as echoes of men and women long since dead. The Builders who left their flesh were as gods for a while, but when men returned to the lands of the west their expectations became a subtle trap. The Builder spirits found themselves ensnared by myth, each tale growing around the spirits, reinforced by them, weaving them into a fabric of belief that both shaped and trapped them until they could scarcely remember a time when they were anything other than what men believed them to be.”
“And Kelem?” He was the one that worried me. “Can he come back? Will he remember . . . uh, what happened?”
“It will take him time to gather himself. Kelem was rock-sworn. If he has not died properly then in time he will go into the earth. And yes, he will remember. It will be a long while before he’s snared into story. Perhaps never since he is aware of the danger.”
I stared at the stone walls around us. “I need to—”
Yusuf raised a hand. “The rock-sworn are slow to act. It will take time before Kelem shows his face to the world again, and time is what he doesn’t have, what none of us have. The world is cracking, Prince Jalan. The Wheel the Builders turned to change the world did not stop turning and as it runs free those changes will increase in size and speed until nothing that we know is left. We are a generation of blind men, walking toward a cliff. Kelem is not your worry.”
“The Lady Blue . . . the Dead King.” I didn’t want to say their names. I’d done a good job of keeping both out of my thoughts ever since escaping Hell. In fact if that damned djinn hadn’t sparked my memories then I might have managed never to think about the whole journey and poor Snorri ever again. “Those are the two I need to worry about?”
“Even so.” Yusuf nodded.
Omar just looked more confused and mouthed “who?” at me from across the table.
“Well.” I leaned back in my chair. “That’s all beyond me. All I want to do is get home.”
“It’s a war your grandmother cares about.” Yusuf spoke the words softly but they carried an uncomfortable weight.
“The Red Queen has her war and she can keep it,” I said. “It’s not the kind of thing men like me can change one way or the other. I don’t want any part of it. I just want to go home and . . . relax.”
“You say this, and yet you have been changing things at an astonishing rate, Prince Jalan. Defeating unborn in the northern wastes, dethroning Kelem in his mines, chasing the Dead King into Hell . . . and you hold the key, do you not?”
I gave Yusuf an angry stare. He knew entirely too much. “I have a key, yes. And you’re not having it. It’s mine.” I’d be hanging on to Loki’s key with everything I had until I got home. Then I’d hand it over to the old woman in a heartbeat and wait to be showered with praise, gold, and titles.
Yusuf smiled at me and shrugged. “If you want no part of shaping the future, so be it. I will arrange passage back to Red March for you. It will take a few days. Relax here. Enjoy the city. I’m sure you know your way around.”
When someone lets you off too easily there’s always that suspicion that they know something you do not. It’s an irritating thing, like sunburn, but I know a sure-fire way to ease it.
“Let’s get a drink!”
“Let’s go win some gold.” Omar jerked his head toward the grand library: a quarter of a mile past it the largest of Hamada’s racetracks would be packed to bursting with Libans screaming at camels.
“A drink first,” I said.
Omar was always willing to compromise, even though he kept to his faith’s prohibition on alcohol. “A little one.” He patted his well-rounded form and beneath his robes coins clinked reassuringly against each other. “I’m buying.”
“A little one,” I lied. Never drink small if it’s at someone else’s expense. And besides, I had no intention of going to the races. In the past two days I’d seen more than enough of camels.
The city of Hamada is officially dry, which is ironic since it’s the only place to be found with any water in hundreds of square miles of arid dunes. One may not purchase or drink alcohol in any form anywhere within the kingdom of Liba. A crying shame given how damnable hot the place is. However, the Mathema attracts rich students from across the Broken Empire and from the deepest interior of the continent of Afrique and they bring with them a thirst for more than just water or knowledge. And so there exist in Hamada, for those who know where to look, watering holes of a different kind, to which the imams and city guard turn a blind eye.
“Mathema.” Omar hissed it through the grille of iron strips defending the tiny window. The heavy door containing the window was set into the whitewashed wall of a narrow alley on the east side of the city. The wooden door was a giveaway in itself, wood being expensive in the desert. Most houses in this quarter had a screen of beads to dissuade the flies and relied on the threat of being publicly impaled to dissuade any thief. Though what horror “publicly” adds to “impaled” I’ve never been clear on.
We followed the door-keeper, a skinny, ebony-hued man of uncertain years clad only in a loincloth, along a dark and sweltering corridor past the entrance to the cellar where a still bubbled dangerously to itself, cooking up grain alcohol of the roughest sort, and up three flights of stairs to the roof. Here a canopy of printed cloth, floating between a score of supports, covered the entire roof space, offering blessed shade.
“Two whiskies,” I told the man as Omar and I collapsed onto mounds of cushions.
“Not for me.” Omar wagged a finger. “Coconut water, with nutmeg.”
“Two whiskies and what he said.” I waved the man off and sank deeper into the cushions, not caring what it was that had stained them. “Christ, I need a drink.”
“What happened at the opera?” Omar asked.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t say a thing or move a muscle until five minutes had passed and a young boy in a white shirt had brought our drinks. I picked up my first “whisky.” Drained it. Made the gasping noise and reached for the next. “That. Is. Good.” I took the second in two gulps. “Three more whiskies!” I hollered toward the stairs—the boy wouldn’t have reached the bottom yet. Then I rolled back. Then I told my story.
“And that’s that.” The sun had set and the boy had returned to light half a dozen lamps before my race through the highlights of my journey had reached all the way from the ill-fated opera house to the Gate of Peace in Hamada. “And he lived happily ever after.” I tried to get up and found myself on all fours, considerably more drunk than I had imagined myself to be.
“Incredible!” Omar leaning forward, both fists beneath his chin. He could have been talking about my method for finally finding my feet, but I think it was my tale that had impressed him. Even without mention of anything that happened to me in Hell and with talk of the unborn and the Dead King cut to a minimum it really was an incredible tale. I might think another man was humouring me, but Omar had always taken me at my word on everything—which was foolish and a terrible trait in a chronic gambler, but there it was.
For a long and pleasantly silent moment I sat back and savoured my drink. An unpleasant memory jerked me out of my reverie. I set my whisky down, hard.
“What the hell happened in the desert then?” As much as I like talking about myself I realized that in my eagerness to escape becoming part of Yusuf’s world-saving calculations I’d forgotten to ask why, apparently for only the second time in eight centuries, a Builders’ Sun had ignited, and why close enough to Hamada to shake the sand out of their beards?
“My father has closed the Builders’ eyes in Hamada. I think perhaps they don’t like that.” Omar put his palm across the mouth of his cup and rolled it about its rim.
“What?” I hadn’t felt drunk until I tried to make sense of what he said. “The Builders are dust.”
“Master Yusuf just told you that they still echo in their machines. Copies of men, or at least they were copies long ago . . . They watch us. Father thinks they herd us, guide us like goats and sheep. So he has sought out their eyes and put them out.”
“It took a thousand years for someone to do that?” I reached for my cup, nearly knocking it over.
“It took a long time for the Mathema to discover all the Builders’ eyes.” Omar shrugged. “And longer still to decide the time was right to share that information with a caliph.”
“Why now?”
“Because our equations indicate the Builders may be done with herding and guiding . . .”
I didn’t want to know what came after that so I took a gulp of my whisky. “. . . it may be time for the slaughtering,” Omar said.
“Why for God’s sake?” What I really meant was, why me? Do it in a hundred years and I wouldn’t give a damn.
“The magic is breaking the world. The more it’s used the easier it is to use and the wider the cracks grow. Kill us and the problem might go away.” He watched me, eyes dark and solemn.
“But destroying Hamada is hardly going to . . . oh.”
Omar nodded. “Everyone. Everywhere. They can do it too.”
Footsteps on the stairs, a dark shape hurrying to Omar’s side, a hasty whispered exchange. I watched, trying to focus, tipping my cup and discovering it empty. “Who’s your friend?”
Omar got to his feet and I stood too, his steadiness making me realize quite how much I was swaying. “You’re not off?” The racing finished hours ago.
“Father has called us all to the palace. This explosion of yours has changed things—perhaps turned theory into fact. We all saw it, then felt it. I was knocked off my feet. Perhaps Father will share with us how and why we were spared. Hopefully he will have a plan to stop it happening again!” Omar followed the caliph’s messenger toward the stairs, waving. “So good to see you alive, my friend.”
I half-sat half-collapsed back into the cushions. Even though he never used it against me I always held the fact that Omar’s father was the caliph of Liba, where mine was only a cardinal, to be a black mark against his name. Even a seventh son looks like a good deal to a man who is tenth in line. Still, when the caliph calls, you come. I couldn’t hold that against Omar, though he had left me to drown my sorrows by myself. Not to mention added to those troubles with his talk of long-dead Builders lurking in ancient machines and wishing us ill. Even drunk I wasn’t about to believe that nonsense, but there was definitely something bad happening.
I stared up at the stars through a gap in the awning. “What time is it anyway?”
“Lacking an hour to midnight.”
I lifted my head and looked around. It had been a rhetorical question. I had thought myself alone up here.
“Who said that?” I couldn’t make out any human figures, just low hillocks of cushions. “Show yourself. Don’t make me drink alone!”
A black shape detached itself from the most distant corner, close to the roof’s edge and the fifty-foot drop into the street below. For a moment my heart lurched as I thought of Aslaug, but it had been a man’s voice. A lean but well-muscled figure resolved itself, tall but not quite my height, face shrouded in shadow and long dark hair. He walked with the exaggerated care of the quite drunk, clutching an earthenware flask in one hand, and flomped bonelessly into the cushions vacated by Omar.
Moonlight revealed him in a rippling slice, falling through the gap between one awning and the next. The silver light painted him, from a grisly burn that covered his left cheek, down a plain white shirt to the hilt of a sword. A dark eye regarded me, glittering amid the burn, the other lost behind a veil of hair. He raised his flask toward me, then swigged from it. “Now you’re not drinking alone.”
“Well that’s good.” I took a gulp from my own pewter cup. “Does a man no good to drink by himself. Especially not after what I’ve been through.” I felt very maudlin, as a man in his cups is wont to do without lively music and good company.
“I’m a very long way from home,” I said, suddenly as miserable and homesick as I had ever been.
“Me too.”
“Red March is a thousand miles south of us.”
“The Renar Highlands are further.”
For some reason known only to drunkards that angered me. “I’ve had a hard time.”
“These are hard days.”
“Not just today.” I drank again. “I’m a prince you know.” Quite how that would get me sympathy I wasn’t sure.
“Liba is straining at the seams with princes. I was born a prince too.”
“Not that I’ll ever be king . . .” I kept to my own thread.
“Ah,” the stranger said. “My path to inheritance is also unclear.”
“My father . . .” Somehow my train of thought slipped away from me. “He never loved me. A cold man.”
“My own has that reputation too. Our disagreements have been . . . sharp.” The man drank from his flask. The light caught him again and I could see he was young. Even younger than me.
Perhaps it was relief at being safe and drunk and not being chased by monsters that did it, but somehow all the grief and injustice of my situation that there hadn’t been time for until now bubbled up out of me.
“I was just a boy . . . I saw him do it . . . killed them both. My mother, and my . . .” I choked and couldn’t speak.
“A sibling?” he asked.
I nodded and drank.
“I saw my mother and brother killed,” he said. “I was young too.”
I couldn’t tell if he were mocking me, topping each of my declarations with his own variant.
“I still have the scars of that day!” I raised my shirt to show the pale line where Edris Dean’s sword had pierced my chest.
“Me too.” He pushed back his sleeves and moved his arms so the moonlight caught on innumerable silvery seams criss-crossing his skin.
“Jesus!”
“He wasn’t there.” The stranger pulled back into the shadow. “Just the hook-briar. And that was enough.”
I winced. Hook-briar is nasty stuff. My new friend seemed to have dived in headfirst. I raised my cup. “Drink to forget.”
“I have better ways.” He opened his left hand, revealing a small copper box, moonlight gleaming on a thorn pattern running around its lip. He might have better ways than alcohol but he drank from his flask, and deeply.
I watched the box, my eye fascinated by the familiarity of it—but, familiar or not, no part of me wanted to touch it. It held something bad.
Like my new friend I drank too, though I also had better ways of burying a memory. I let the raw whisky run down my throat, hardly tasting it now, hardly feeling the burn.
“Drink to dull the pain, my brother!” I’m an amiable drunk. Given enough time I always reach the point where every man is my brother. A few more cups and I declare my undying love for all and sundry. “I’m not sure there’s a bit of me that isn’t bruised.” I lifted my shirt again, trying to see the bruising across my ribs. In the dark it looked less impressive than I remembered. “I could show you a camel footprint but . . .” I waved the idea away.
“I’ve a few bruises myself.” He lifted his own shirt and the moonlight caught the hard muscles of his stomach. The thorn scars patterned him there too, but it was his chest that caught my eye. In exactly the spot where I have a thin line of scar recording the entry of Edris Dean’s sword my drinking companion sported his own record of a blade’s passage into his flesh, though the scar was black, and from it dark tendrils of scar spread root-like across his bare chest. These were old injuries though, long healed. He had fresher hurts—better light would show them angry and red, the bite of a blade in his side, above the kidney, other slices, puncture wounds, a tapestry of harm.
“Shit. What the hell—”
“Dogs.”
“Pretty damn vicious dogs!”
“Very.”
I swallowed the word “bastard” and cast about instead for some claim or tale that the bastard wouldn’t instantly top.
“That sibling I mentioned, killed when I saw my mother killed . . .”
He looked up at me, again just the one eye glittering above his burn scar, the other hidden. “Yes?”
“Well she’s not properly dead. She’s in Hell plotting her return and planning revenge.”
“On who?”
“Me, you.” I shrugged. “The living. Mostly me I think.”
“Ah.” He leaned back into the cushions. “Well there you’ve got me beat.”
“Good.” I drank again. “I was starting to think we were the same person.”
The boy came back, refilling my cup from his jug and moving the lanterns closer to us to light our conversation. The man said something to him in the desert tongue but I couldn’t follow it. Too drunk. Also, I don’t know more than the five words I learned in my year living in the city.
With the lamplight showing me the fellow’s face I had a sudden sense of déjà vu. I’d seen him before—possibly recently—or someone who reminded me strongly of him. Pieces of the puzzle started to settle out of my drunken haze. “Prince you say?” Every other rich man in Liba seemed to be a prince, but in the north, where we both clearly came from, “prince” was a richer currency. “Where from again?” I remembered but hoped I was wrong.
“Renar.”
“Not . . . Ancrath?”
“Maybe . . . once.”
“By Christ! You’re him!”
“I’m certainly someone.” He lifted his flask high, draining it.
“Jorg Ancrath.” I knew him though I’d seen him just the one time, over a year ago in that tavern in Crath City, and he hadn’t sported such a burn then.
“I’d say ‘at your service’, but I’m not. And you’re a prince of Red March, eh? Which would make you one of the Red Queen’s brood?” He made to put his flask down and missed the ground, drunker than he had seemed.
“I have that honour,” I said, my lips numb and framing the words roughly. “I am one of her many breeding experiments—not one that has best pleased her though.”
“We’re all a disappointment to someone.” He swigged again, sinking further back into his cushions. “Best to disappoint your enemies though.”
“These damnable mathmagicians have put us together, you know.” I knew Yusuf had let me go too easily.
Jorg gave no sign of having heard me. I wondered if he’d passed out. A long pause turned into midnight, as it often does when you’re very drunk. The distant hour bell jolted him into speech. “I’ve made plenty of seers eat their predictions.”
“Got their sums wrong this time though—I’m no use to you. It should have been my sister. She was to have been the sorceress. To stand at your side. Bring you to the throne.” I found my face wet. I’d not wanted to think about any of this.
Jorg mumbled something, but all I caught was a name. Katherine.
“Perhaps . . . she never had a name. She never saw this world.” I stopped, my throat choked with the foolishness too much drink will put in a man. I drained my cup. There’s a scribe who lives behind our eyes scribbling down an account of events for our later perusal. If you keep drinking then at some point he rolls up his scroll, wraps up his quills, and takes the night off. What remained in my cup proved sufficient to give him his marching orders. I’m sure we continued to mutter drunkenly at each other, King Jorg of Renar and I. I expect we made a few loud and passionate declarations before we passed out. We probably banged our cups on the roof and declared all men our brothers or our foe, depending on the kind of drunks we were, but I have no record of it.
I do remember that I confided my problems with Maeres Allus to the good king, and he kindly offered me his sage advice. I recall that the solution was both elegant and clever and that I swore to adopt it. Sadly not a single word of that counsel remained with me the following day.
My last memory is an image. Jorg lying sprawled, dead to the world, looking far younger in sleep than I had ever imagined him. Me pulling a rug up across him to keep off the cold of the desert night, then staggering dangerously toward the stairs. I wonder how many lives might have been saved if I had just rolled him off the roof’s edge . . .
Many men drink to forget. Alcohol will wash away the tail end of a night, erasing helpful advice, and the occasional embarrassing incident, whilst trying to weave a path home. Unfortunately if you’ve developed a talent for suppressing older memories, accumulated while depressingly sober, then alcohol will often erode those barriers. When that happens, rather than sleep in the blessed oblivion of the deeply inebriated you will in fact suffer the nightmare of reliving the worst times you’ve ever known. A river of whisky carried me back into memories of Hell.
“Jesus Christ! What was that thing?” I gasp it between deep breaths, bent double, hands on my thighs. Looking back I see the raised dust that marks our hasty escape from the small boy and his ridiculously vast dog.
“You did want to see monsters, Jal.” Snorri, leaning back against another of the towering stones that punctuate the plain.
“A hell-hound . . .” I straighten up and shake my head. “Well I’ve seen enough now. Where’s this fucking river?”
“Come on.” Snorri leads off, his axe over his shoulder, the blades finding something bloody in the deadlight and offering it back to Hell.
We trek another mile, or ten, in the dust. I’m starting to see figures in the distance, souls toiling across the plain or clustered in groups, or just standing there.
“We’re getting closer.” Snorri waves his axe toward the shade of a man a few hundred yards off, staked out among the rocks. “It takes courage to cross the Slidr. It gives many pause.”
“Looks like more than a lack of courage holding that one back!” The stakes go through the soul’s hands and feet.
Snorri shakes his head, walking on. “The mind makes its own bonds here.”
“So all these people are doomed to wander here forever? They won’t ever cross over?”
“Men leave echoes of themselves . . .” He pauses as if trying to recall the words. “Echoes scattered across the geometry of death. These are shed skins. The dead have to leave anything they can’t carry across the river.”
“Where are you getting this from?”
“Kara. I wasn’t going to spend months travelling to death’s door with a völva and not ask her any questions about what to expect!”
I let that one lie. It’s what I did, but then I never had any intention of ending up here.
We slog up a low ridge and beyond it the land falls away. There below us is the river, a gleaming silver ribbon in a valley that weaves away into grey distances, the only thing in all that awful place with any hint of life in it. I start forward but immediately the ground drops in a crumbling cliff a little taller than me and at its base a broad sprawl of hook-briar, black and twisted, as you’ll see in a wood after the first frosts.
“We’ll have to go a—” I break off. There’s movement on the edge of the briar. I shift to get a better view. It’s the boy from the milestone, lunging in among the thorns, leaving them glistening. “Hey!”
“Leave him, Jal. It is the way it is. It has been like this for an age before we came and will be like it after we leave.”
If we leave!
“But . . .”
Snorri sets off to find an easier route down. I can’t leave, though. Almost as if the briar has me hooked too. “Hey! Wait! Keep still and I can get you out.” I cast about for a way down the cliff that won’t pitch me in among the thorns.
“I’m not trying to get out.” The boy pauses his lunging and looks up at me. Even from this distance his face is a nightmare, flayed by the briar, his flesh ripped, studded with broken thorns bedded bone-deep.
“What . . .” I step back as the ground crumbles beneath my foot and sandy soil cataracts over the drop. “What the hell are you doing then?”
“Looking for my brother.” Blood spills from torn lips. “He’s in there somewhere.”
He throws himself back at the thorns. The spikes are as long as his fingers and set with a small hook behind each point to lodge in the flesh.
“Stop! For Christ’s sake!”
I try to climb down where the cliff dips but it breaks away and I scamper back.
“He wouldn’t stop if it were me.” The words sound ragged as if his cheeks are torn. I can hardly see him in the mass of the briar now.
“Stop—” Snorri’s hand grabs my shoulder and he pulls me away midprotest.
“You can’t get caught up in this. Everything here is a snare.” He walks me away.
“Me? Hasn’t this place had its hooks in you ever since you first held that key?” They’re just words though, without heat. I’m not thinking about Snorri. I’m thinking about my sister, dead before she was ever born. I’m thinking about the boy and his brother and what I might do to save my own sibling. Less than that, I say to myself. Less than that.
I woke, still drunk, and with so many devils hammering on the inside of my head that it took me an age to understand I was in a prison cell. I lay there in the heat, eyes tight against the pain and the blinding light lancing in through a small high window, too miserable to call out or demand release. Omar found me there at last. I don’t know how much later. Long enough to pass the contents of a jug of water through me and leave the place stinking slightly worse than I found it.
“Come on, old friend.” He helped me up, wrinkling his nose, still grinning. The guards watched disapprovingly behind him. “Why do you northerners do this to yourselves? Even if God did not forbid it drinking is a poor bet.”
I staggered out along the corridor to the guards’ room, wincing, and watching the world through slitted eyes. “I’m never doing it again, so let’s not talk about it any more. OK?”
“Do you even remember what happened to you last night?” Omar caught me as I stumbled into the street and with a grunt of effort kept me on my feet.
“Something about a camel?” I recalled some sort of argument with a camel in the small hours of the morning. Had it looked at me wrong? Certainly I’d decided it was responsible for the footprint on my backside and all other indignities I’d ever suffered from the species. “Jorg!” I remembered. “Jorg fucking Ancrath! He was up there, Omar! On that roof. You’ve got to warn the caliph!”
I knew there was bad blood between the Horse Coast kingdoms and Liba, raids across the sea and such, and that the Ancraths had alliances with the Morrow, which made Liba their foe. What I thought one man could do to the Caliph of Liba, especially if his head was like mine this morning, I wasn’t sure. This was, however, Jorg Ancrath who had destroyed Duke Gellethar along with his army, castle and the mountain they all sat upon. We had returned through Gelleth months after the explosion and the sky was still—“Christ! The explosion. In the desert! It was him, wasn’t it?”
“It was.” Omar signed for Allah’s protection. “He has met with my father and they are now friends.”
I stopped in the street and thought about that for a moment. “Starting his empire building young, isn’t he?” I was impressed though. My grandmother had alliances in Liba—she’d reached out far and wide in the hope of good marriages—but her goal had been finding blood that mixed with her sons’ would produce a worthy heir, someone to fill in the gaps in the Silent Sister’s visions of the future . . . my sister. Jorg of Ancrath had other plans and I wondered how long it would be before they took him to Vyene to present his case to Congression and demand the Empire throne. “How far will it take him, I wonder . . .”
“What do you make of him?” Omar had come back for me, a caliph’s son waiting for me in the dusty street. He seemed strangely interested in my answer. It struck me then that I’d never seen him as clearly as I did there that morning, burdened by my self-inflicted pain. Soft, pudgy, Omar, the bad gambler, too rich, too amiable for his own good. But as he watched me with an intensity he saved for the roulette wheel I understood that the Mathema saw a different man—a man who would not only insert my answer into an equation of unearthly complexity, but one who might also solve it. “Can he match his ambition?”
“What?” I clutched my head. I didn’t have to fake it. “Jorg? Don’t know. Don’t care. I just want to go home.”