Emperor of Thorns

I led Lesha’s horse away from the camp and settled a hundred yards off over a low ridge. Despite myself I slept poorly, haunted by Sunny’s screams and prodded awake by each small noise in the darkness.

* * *

Dawn found me back at the Bad Dogs’ camp. I blessed the Iberico’s poisons for the lack of flies and rats. What beauty there is to war is in the moment. After a day any battlefield is little more than carrion and scavengers. In the Iberico at least the carrion doesn’t swarm with flies. In fact, apart from my own indulgence with the axe, the dead looked untouched with only the occasional large and hardy cockroach digging in for breakfast.

I collected my bits and pieces. Balky favoured me with a reproachful stare as I loaded him. I tethered the mule to Lesha’s stallion, and led them both off into the promised land.

Without Lesha’s guidance I had nothing to stop me walking into the invisible fires that had scoured her so badly. We walk a knife-edge each day though, and most don’t know it – at least in the promised lands, in the Iberico, in Kane’s Scar and Ill-Shadow back in Ancrath, in such places there’s no pretence, no lie of safety, no deception that like the ancients’ song, ‘love is all you need’. At a single false step you can and will burn. As always.

At times I let Lesha’s horse precede me, but horses like to be led and prodding him along made for slow going.

The first time I saw it I wasn’t sure what my eyes were telling me. On a slope to our right a shoulder of weathered Builder-stone broke through the shale. Above and around it the air shimmered in a heat haze. The burned side of my face throbbed with it, and in the moment I closed that eye with wincing – the haze vanished. Looking once more, and only with the eye so nearly blinded when Gog burned me, I saw the shimmer again, like the ghosts of flame that had danced on Jane beneath Mount Honas.

‘Get along.’ I pulled Balky up on his tether. He let out a hee-haw loud enough to crack rocks. The notion to push him through that shimmer came and went. Other considerations aside, I’d have to carry my own kit. If one of those mouse-sized roaches had been handy I would have tossed that through. A stray thought occurred. I dug out the view-ring from my pack and held it up to watch the phenomenon through. In an instant, shades of red wrapped the world, painted in thick crimson around the shoulder of old stone, fading to less violent hues further down the slope. Along our path at the bottom of the dry valley the ring showed occasional regions of dull orange hanging mist-like.

‘Damn but that’s handy. What else can you show me?’

And like the genie from Aladdin’s lamp, Fexler Brews stood before me on the road, no larger than life and no smaller. I took a step back, the kind of step that seeks no permission and springs from the days when men’s fear was written into the marrow of our race. The kind I always regret. I held the ring aside and Fexler vanished along with the shades of red and orange. Brought back and he returned with the ring.

‘What am I doing here, Brews?’ I felt silly talking to something seen only though a small loop of steel, even out in the wilds with none but horse and mule to watch me.

Fexler spread his hands. He wore the same whites he had back at Castle Morrow, not a speck of dust on them.

‘Why the mystery? Just tell me plain and—’

He turned and walked away down the valley.

‘Hell.’ And I followed, hauling Balky after.

20

Five years earlier

Fexler Brews’ ghost led me through the Iberico Hills. We walked from well before noon until well after, long enough for me to grow weary and for the cuts on my back, just above my hip, to start with that nagging ache and heat that speaks of infection.

The hills held every colour from bone-white through the greys to ochre. Baked mud, crumbling earth, exposed rock. And from time to time some rusting hulk, eroding in that stubborn way that Builder works have about them, refusing the elements century after century. Most of them blocks of metal with no hint of function, looking like steel, pocked and pitted, some large as houses, some askew as if pushed aside by giants, all stained with corrosion in trickled green and powder-white. We passed one that buzzed, a high whine that hurt my teeth, and Fexler vanished until it lay well behind me. In another place a leaning metal column, half-buried, or maybe nine-tenths buried, sang in a voice of staggering beauty and a language unknown to me. I stood with the sun’s heat beating against me and the hairs on end across my neck, just bathing in it.

I saw Fexler only through the viewing ring and perhaps the ring just drew him for me, over-riding the scenery like a painting on glass. Either way he guided me through the dry washes and dusty gullies of the promised land, without speaking, pausing only when I paused.

We passed one machine where the metal sheeting had torn away to reveal spinning cylinders, wheels turning in wheels, all moving in silence, gleaming. It reminded me of the interior of the watch in my pack. Fexler wouldn’t speak of it.

The shadows had grown long when our path following a gully came to dead end hemmed in by crumbling walls of earth and sand. Fexler came to a halt, watching me.

‘Why have we stopped?’ I asked. Not that I wasn’t happy to have stopped – there just seemed no reason for it.

Fexler vanished.

Banging the view ring against the hilt of my sword didn’t restore him. I made a slow turn, completing the circle with my arms spread. Lesha’s stallion watched with mild interest. Balky just looked vacant.

I stepped toward Fexler’s last position and stubbed my toe. A day early an expert had tortured me, albeit very briefly. Stubbing my toe proved more intense and more shocking. I reached shoulder-deep into my well of obscenities and released a string of quite spectacular examples. It deserved a better audience. In time, after all the hopping and cursing, I hobbled over to discover what had lamed me.

With some kneeling, scraping, and brushing, I uncovered a lid of Builder-stone, circular and about a yard across. Rusty stains indicated that the thing had once been secured in place by more than its weight. The spare sword I’d strapped to Lesha’s horse proved useful for levering the lid up the few inches necessarily to shunt it by degrees to one side. It took half a skin of water to replace what the effort had sweated out of me. The sun in those hills is without mercy.

Beneath the lid a shaft led down, unlit, smooth as far as I could tell, and without any odour rising from it. I took a small rock and dropped it into the darkness. It’s not something I could resist doing even if I had no reason for it. The pause before the distant clatter told me that I didn’t want to follow the rock.

‘You could have told me to bring some damn rope!’ I had some despite Fexler’s lack of warning, but I doubted it would be enough.

In a shaft as narrow as the one before me you can brace your back against the wall and your feet on the opposite side, and edge down. However, if the shaft widens, or enters a room, or is smoother than you’d hoped … getting back up might prove difficult. I had come into the Iberico prepared to dare invisible fires. Somehow though, getting stuck in a hole and dying of thirst seemed too pathetic an end to be risked.

I dug the tinderbox from my kit and took off the bandage I’d wrapped around the wound on my upper arm. I had to peel it away, and where the linen stuck it stank, sickly sweet. The dry ends took the flame well enough and burned as it fluttered after the rock I’d dropped in. The sides looked to be parallel all the way down. I guessed it to be some forty-foot deep. I thought a tunnel led off from the bottom but it was hard to tell from my position.