Emperor of Thorns

‘And what does this signify?’ I asked, my finger on a symbol that covered the region. I felt pretty sure I knew. There were three similar symbols marked on the maps of Ancrath in my father’s library, covering the regions of Ill Shadow, Eastern Dark, and Kane’s Scar. But perhaps they served a different purpose in the southlands.

Redmon stepped to the desk and leaned in. ‘Promised regions.’

‘Promised?’ I asked.

‘The half-life lands. Not a place to travel.’

The symbols served the same purpose as they did in Ancrath. They warned of taints lingering from the Builders’ war, stains from their poisons, or shadows from the day of a thousand suns.

‘And the promise?’ I asked.

‘Noble Chen’s promise, of course.’ He looked surprised. ‘That when the half-life has spent itself these lands will be returned to man, to till and plough.’ Redmon pushed the wire-framed reading lenses further up his nose and returned to his ledgers at the big desk before the towering shelves of pigeonholes, each crammed with documents.

I rolled the scroll up and took it in my hand like a baton. ‘I’m taking this to show Lord Robert.’

Redmon watched with anguish as I left, as if I’d stolen his only son to use as target practice. ‘I’ll look after it,’ I said.

I found my uncle in the stables. He spent more time there than anywhere else, and since I’d met his shrew of a wife I had come to understand. Horses made her sneeze I heard it told, worse and worse minute by minute, until it seemed she would sneeze the eyes from her head. Robert found his peace amongst the stalls, talking bloodlines with his stable-master and looking over his stock. He had thirty horses in the castle stables, all prime examples of their lines, and his best knights to ride them, cavalrymen billeted away from the house guard and wall guard in far more luxury, as befits men of title.

‘What do you know of the Iberico?’ I called out as I walked toward him between the stalls.

‘And good afternoon to you, young Jorg.’ He shook his head and patted the neck of the black stallion leaning out at him.

‘I need to go there,’ I said.

He shook his head with emphasis this time. ‘The Iberico are dead land. Promised but not given. You don’t want to go there.’

‘That’s true. I don’t want to. But I need to go there. So what can you tell me?’ I asked.

The stallion snorted and rolled an eye as if venting Robert’s frustration for him.

‘I can tell you that men who spend time in such places sicken and die. Some take years before the poison eats them from within, others last weeks or days, losing their hair and teeth, vomiting blood.’

‘I will be quick then.’ Behind the set of my jaw second thoughts tried to wrest control of my tongue.

‘There are places in the Iberico Hills, unmarked save for the barren look of them, where a man’s skin will fall from him as he walks.’ My uncle pushed the horse away and stepped closer to me. ‘What grows in those hills is twisted, what lives there unnatural. I doubt your need exceeds the risks.’

‘You’re right,’ I said. And he was. But when was the world ever so simple as right and wrong? I blinked twice and the red dot watched me from the darkness behind my eyelids. ‘I know you’re right, but often it’s not in me to take the sensible path, Uncle. I’m an explorer. Maybe that itch is in you too?’

He rubbed his beard, a quick grin showing through the worry. ‘Explore somewhere else?’

‘I should take my foolish risks while I’m young, no? Better now than when that little girl you’ve found for me is grown and looking to me to keep her in silks and splendour. If my mistakes prove fatal, find her another husband.’

‘This is nothing to do with Miana. You just shouldn’t do this, Jorg. If I thought it would stop you I would tell you “no” and set a guard to watch you.’

I bowed, turned, and walked away. ‘I’ll take a mule. No sense risking good horseflesh.’

‘On that we’re agreed,’ he called after me. ‘Don’t let it drink from any standing water there.’

I stepped back into the brightness of the day. The wind still raked across the courtyard, cold from the sea, but the sun would burn you even so.

‘Visit Carrod Springs first!’ Robert’s shout reached me as I started for my quarters.

‘Qalasadi and Ibn Fayed.’ The names tasted exotic.

‘A man of power and a powerful man.’ My grandfather rested in the chair where the Earls of Morrow had sat for generations, facing the sea.

A circle of Builder glass, stronger than the walls around it and a full three yards in diameter, showed us the Middle Sea, the curvature of the Earth making it an azure infinity, white-flecked with waves. Out beyond sight across those depths, across the Corsair Isle, no further from us than Crath City, lay Roma and all her dominions.

Caliph Ibn Fayed might keep his court in the heart of a desert but his ships reached out across that sea, Moorish hands seeking to reclaim these lands that had been passed back and forth between Christendom and the Moslems since forever. Ibn Fayed’s mathmagician, Qalasadi, had likely returned to the shadow of the caliph’s throne to calculate the optimal timing for the next strike, and the odds of its success.

Far below us a wave slapped the cliffs, no tremor of it reaching the room but a high spray beading the glass. Twice a day they lowered a stable-boy with bucket and cloth to ensure that nothing but age dimmed Grandfather’s view.

‘Four sails,’ he said.

I had only seen three. The merchant cog, red-hulled, hauling cargo along the coast, and two fishing boats, bobbing further out.

Grandfather saw my frown. ‘Out there, on the horizon.’ A soft-voiced man despite the creaks of age.

A white flash. The sails of some wide-ranging vessel. A warship? A pirate cutter from the Isle? Or some flat-bellied scow out of Ægypt, treasure-laden?

I went closer to the glass, pressed a hand to its coldness. How many centuries ago had it been looted and from what ruin? Redmon surely had a scroll in his windy tower that held the secret.

‘I can’t allow them to live,’ I said. The caliph was just a name to me, Qalasadi filled my thoughts. The numbered man.

Grandfather laughed in his chair, the whale-ivory back of it spreading above him like the spray of a breaking wave. ‘Would you hunt down every man who wronged you, Jorg? However far-flung? However long they run? Seems to me a man like that is a slave to chance, always hunting, no time for living.’

‘They would have seen you die screaming while the poison ate you,’ I said. ‘Your wife too. Your son.’

‘And would have had you take the blame.’ He yawned wide enough to crack his jaw and ran the heels of both palms across the grey stubble of his beard.

‘Poison is a dirty weapon,’ I said. Not that I had been above its use in Gelleth. I maintain a balanced view of the world, but that balance is always in my favour.

‘We play a dirty game.’ Grandfather nodded and watched me from his wrinkles with those dark eyes so like Mother’s.

Perhaps it wasn’t the poison that irked me. Or setting me up for the fall – a chance inspiration surely and none of Ibn Fayed’s doing. I recalled Qalasadi in that courtyard the only time we met, his assessment, his calculation as he considered the probabilities. Maybe that lack of malice had made it so personal; he reduced me to numbers and played the odds. Fexler’s ghost had been constructed by reducing the true man to numbers. I found I didn’t like the process.