Emperor of Thorns

Chella sensed the Dead King always, from a thousand miles she felt him as something crawling beneath her skin. In the castle where he laid his plans no place was free of the taste of him, bitter on the tongue.

At last they came to the doors to Artur’s court, slabs of old oak with black iron hinges scrolling out across them. The bog-stink wrinkled her nose. Mire-ghouls watched them from the shadows to either side, some with black darts clutched in stained hands. Before the doors two giants, each more than eight foot tall, freaks from the promised lands, their dena scorched by the Builders’ fire so that they grew wrong. Big but wrong. And now dead. Meat-puppets held by the necromancers’ will.

The giants stepped aside and Chella moved toward the doors. The presence of the Dead King overwhelmed that of his court, reaching through stone and wood to swamp her senses. In the fullness of Chella’s necromantic power, when she stepped as far from life as a person can and still return, she knew the Death King’s presence as a dark-light, a black sun whose radiance froze and corrupted but somehow still drew her on. Now though, dressed only in the tatters of her former strength, with her blood pumping once again, Chella felt her master as a threat, as something sculpted from every memory of hurt or harm or pain, screaming hatred in a register just beyond hearing.

She set her hands to the doors and found them trembling.

The stink of lichkin hits flesh like ink hits blotting paper: it sinks bone-deep, overriding irrelevances such as the nose. Men are busy dying from the moment they’re born but it’s a crawl from the cradle to the grave. Being near a lichkin makes it a race.

The Dead King’s court lay in darkness but as Chella pushed the doors open a cold glow began to spread within the chamber. Ghosts, tight-wrapped around their masters, began to unfurl, like an outer skin, flayed from the lichkin by the presence of life. The spirits burned with the light of their own misery, pale apparitions, delicate tissues of memory, membranes of misused lives. The lichkin themselves were blind spots on her living eyes, as if patches of her retina had died, folding the room’s image over itself in those places. In times when the necromancy ran deep in her and her blood lay still, Chella had seen the lichkin, bone-white, bone-thin, the wedge of their eyeless heads filled with small sharp teeth, each hand dividing into three root-like fingers.

‘Kai!’ She felt his retreat. The sound of his name made him stop. He knew better than to run.

The Dead King sat on Lord Artur Elgin’s driftwood throne. He wore Artur Elgin’s robes. They fitted him well. Blue-leather shoulders, a laced front fixed with silver clasps each set with sea-stone, the leather giving over to thick velvet of a deeper midnight blue. He wore Artur Elgin’s body too, and it fitted him less well, hunched and awkward, and when he lifted his head to Chella the smile that he made with the dead man’s mouth was an awful thing.

19

Five years earlier

Two knives broke in the effort to uncoil the scorpion. When I locked its tail in place with Old Mary’s clamps and levered it apart using a sword, the corpse opened in a series of jerking releases, accompanied by crunches like glass breaking under a heel.

‘You’re something made,’ I told it. ‘A clever piece of clockwork.’

I could see no cogs or wheels though, no matter how close I squinted. Just black crystal, traces of clear sparkling jelly and multitudes of wires, most of them so thin as to be on the edge of invisible.

‘Something broken.’ I put it into Lesha’s saddle-pack to take with me.

It took hours to dig two graves. My wounds stung and smarted. Later they ached and throbbed. I used an axe to break up the ground and a shield to scoop the soil away. The earth tasted sour, worse than the salts from Carrod Springs.

I buried Greyson first. I found a visored helm, scoured it out with sand, and put it on him to cover his face. ‘You be sure to grumble, wherever you find yourself, Sunny.’ Two shield-loads of dust and grit stole the detail from him. Just another corpse. Four more and he made little more than an undulation in the earth. Ten more and I smoothed the ground over.

I set Lesha’s head against her neck. I felt it the right thing to do since I had separated them in the first place. The pieces didn’t seem to fit.

‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Lesha together again.’

I sat beside the grave without looking at her, watching the sun drop toward the west. ‘These men, they weren’t any different to me and mine.’ My cuts stung and throbbed. I thought of how much hurt I’d escaped and the complaints went away. ‘Being at the sharp end of the stick changes your view on the business of poking, sure enough – you’d have to be pretty stupid not to see that one coming though.’ I stopped talking. It wasn’t so much that there wasn’t anyone to hear. When you’ve got death in you and you’re surrounded by corpses, well you’re always going to have some kind of an audience. It was more that what gripped me was too fluid, too uncertain to be captured and spoken. Words are blunt instruments, better suited to murder than to making sense of the world. I filled the grave. It was time.

The sun clung to the horizon with crimson fingers. I straightened and paused mid-step. Red eyes watched me, the sky reflected in the gaze of the fallen. Too many heads lay turned my way for chance to have set their course. Coldness pulsed from the old wound in my chest, necromancy, a numbness like the ghouls’ darts brought, or a detachment maybe, as if some unseen hand were closing around me, walling away the world’s vitality. Close by, Rael lay, a knife in his throat, skewering the old scar where some past attempt had failed. I took my step and his eyes followed the motion.

‘Dead King.’ The words bubbled up, the blood so dark it ran purple over his teeth.

‘Hmmm.’ I picked up the sturdiest of the discarded axes. The Perros Viciosos had favoured axes. The heft of it held a certain comfort. A quick shake rid me of wearies and I set to my task. It’s hard work taking the limbs off a man. The legs especially take a lot of hacking, and flesh is much tougher stuff than you might imagine. As soon as you lose the edge on an axe it tends to bounce off a leather-clad thigh if your stroke is anything but perfect. With luck you’ll break the bone in any case, but to hew the whole limb off? Think cutting down trees: always far harder than you think it should be. By the end my breath came in gasps and sweat dripped from my nose. I settled for taking off hands and feet from the last ten men before collapsing in a cross-legged slump before Rael once more.

‘Life was much easier when death held on to what it was given,’ I said.

I couldn’t tell if Rael still watched me but the Dead King’s presence lingered in the stink of old blood.

‘I’m thinking if you could stand these lads up again you would have done it by now, but better safe than sorry, neh?’

Still nothing. The Dead King seemed to have Chella under his thumb, so that made his interest in me … unsettling.

I leaned in over Rael’s corpse and rapped on his forehead. ‘Hello?’ Gathering my own traces of necromancy and reaching in didn’t seem like the best idea, rather like using your fingers to take a bone from a hungry dog.

Nothing. Perhaps the king had a lot of dead eyes to peer out of – too many people to scare for more than a quick name check with each. I shrugged. At the bottom of it the Perros Viciosos weren’t any more frightening dead than alive. It didn’t mean I wanted to spend my night sleeping among them though. They surely smelled worse dead.