Emperor of Thorns

The provost sat in her ebony chair as if she had remained there since I left, seated the whole time with her ledgers and tallies, amid the geometric splendour of her Moorish halls. The writing desk beside her lay empty, the scribe perhaps dismissed while the provost checked his work. She watched me cross the floor with sufficient interest to pause her quill-scratching.

‘Sanity prevailed, King Jorg?’ she asked. ‘You turned back before the Hills? When I sent Lesha to guide you I had hope that it would be her scars that showed you the way – back through the city gates.’

‘Your granddaughter was both a caution and an inspiration, Provost.’ I came to the step of her dais and offered a deeper bow than she merited. I carried bad news after all. ‘She was an explorer. Our world needs more like her.’

‘Was?’ The old woman didn’t miss much. I felt rather than heard the tensing of the two men at the door.

‘Outlaws attacked our camp while we slept. Perros Viciosos.’

‘Oh.’ That made her old, those two words. Years that had only toughened now for a moment hung their weight upon her head. ‘Better to have found the fire a second time.’

‘Lesha died in the struggle before we were taken, Provost. My man, Greyson, was not so lucky. His was a hard death.’

And yet you survived. She didn’t say it. The Hundred and their spawn have an instinct for survival and it never pays to ask the cost.

The provost sat back in her chair and set her quill on the armrest. A moment later she let her papers fall. ‘I have sixteen grandchildren you know, Jorg?’

I nodded. It didn’t seem the time to say ‘fifteen’.

‘All bright and wonderful children who ran through these halls at one time or other, shrieking, laughing, full of life. A trickle of them at first, then a tide. And their mothers would put them on my lap, always the mothers, and we’d sit and goggle, young to old, a mystery to each other. Then life would sweep them on their way, and now I could more quickly tell you the names of the sixteen district water marshals than of those children. Many I wouldn’t recognize in the street unless you told me to watch out for one.

‘Lesha was a bold girl. Not pretty, but clever and fierce. She could have done my job maybe, but she was never meant for city life. I’m sorry now that I didn’t get to know her better. More sorry for her father, who knew her even less well perhaps but will weep for her where all I have are excuses.’

‘I liked her. The same force pushed us both. I liked Greyson too,’ I said.

It struck me that finding someone I might call a friend had been a rare thing in my life. And in the space of three short months I’d discovered and lost two.

‘I hope whatever you found proves worth the sacrifice.’

The gun hung heavy at my hip, wrapped in leather. Almost as heavy as the copper box on the hip opposite. The provost took up her quill again. No talk now of receptions, feasts with merchants, mass with the cardinal. Perhaps she first wanted to tell her son that his daughter was dead.

‘A man who can’t make sacrifices has lost before he starts, Provost. There was a time when I could spend the lives of those around me without care. Now, sometimes, I care. Sometimes it hurts.’ I thought for a moment of the Nuban falling away after I shot him. ‘But that doesn’t mean that I can’t and won’t sacrifice absolutely anything rather than allow it to be used to rule me, rather than have it be made into a way to lose.’

‘Well now, there’s an attitude that will serve you well at Congression, King Jorg.’ The provost offered me a grim smile, tight in the creases of her face.

‘Your granddaughter though was not something I gave up to advance my cause. I did my best to save her from pain.’

The provost took a scroll and dipped her quill. ‘These Perros will face justice soon enough.’ She shot me a cold look. ‘These road-brothers. This order will send enough of the city guard to hang them all.’

‘They’re all dead, I believe. Perhaps one or two escaped.’ I remembered flinging the hatchet, the man’s arms thrown up as he fell, the second runner vanishing over the rise. ‘One.’ I wanted to go back and hunt him down myself. With effort I unclenched my jaw and met the provost’s gaze.

‘We know of the Perros Viciosos in Albaseat, King Jorg. Tales are brought through our gates, many tales.’

‘Well, let them add that to Lesha’s own story. At the last she brought an end to the Bad Dogs and saved many others from their predations. And I was the end she brought them.’ I thought perhaps Lesha might have approved of that.

The provost shook her head, just a fraction, telling me her disbelief without words. ‘It can’t be that there are less than scores in that band, not with the trouble they have caused, the atrocities …’

‘Two dozen, a few more perhaps.’ I shrugged. ‘It doesn’t take many hands or much imagination to build a reputation on blood and horror.’

‘Two dozen – and yet you killed all but one?’ The provost arched a brow and set her quill down again as if unwilling to record a falsehood.

‘Dear lady, I killed them from youngest child to oldest woman, and when I was done I blunted three axes dismembering their corpses. I am Jorg of Ancrath – I burned ten thousand in Gelleth and didn’t think it too many.’

I gave her my bow and turned to leave. The men at the door, wide and gleaming in the black scales of their armour, stepped aside sharply.

28

Five years earlier

I turned fifteen on the voyage to Afrique. I had always imagined such a journey as an endurance at sea, like the storm-tossed odysseys of legend that end clinging to a raft of wreckage, hidden from the sun by a square of tarpaulin, on the point of drinking your own urine as the faint haze of land rises over the horizon.

The truth is that from Albaseat you can travel by good roads through the kingdoms of Kadiz and Kordoba and come to the Kordoban coast where a promontory ends in a vast rock miles wide – Tariq’s Mountain. Look south from the watchtowers on the heights of this wave-lapped mountain, across two dozen miles of ocean, and the shores of Afrique may be seen, bare peaks rising in challenge above a morning sea mist. Look west, across Tariq Bay and you’ll see Port Albus where many ships wait to carry a man with gold in his pocket to whatever corner of the Earth he desires.

It isn’t that Afrique is so far away that gives her mystery. From the realms of the Horse Coast you can almost reach out to touch her, but as I’ve learned with Katherine, touching is not knowing. The fringes of Maroc may be seen from the watchtowers of the Rock, but the vastness of Afrique sprawls south so far that at its extreme are regions more distant from the Horse Coast than the frozen north of the Jarls, as far as Utter in the east, as far even as the Great Lands of the West across the ocean.

In short then I was at sea for only a day, and on that day, midway between two continents, out of sight of all land – thanks to the persistence of the coastal mists – the hour of my birth came and went and I entered my fifteenth year.

I had arrived at Port Albus burned dark by the Kordoban sun, which in truth is much the same as the sun of Kadiz and of Wennith and of Morrow, though the Kordobans like to claim it as their own. I negotiated passage across the straits on quays thronged with as many Moors, Nubans, and men of Araby as with men of the Horse Coast or Port Kingdoms. Captain Akham of the Keshaf agreed to carry me that morning. I waited while thick-muscled Nubans, black as trolls, brought ashore the last of his cargo. They stacked up white salt-blocks thick as a hand span and a foot square, carried from the unknown across great deserts on camel trains. And beside them, baskets of fruit from the groves of Maroc. Lemons larger than any I’d held, and objects picked from no tree I had seen before. I had a stevedore name them for me, pineapple, star fruit, hairy lychee. I bought one of each for two copper stallions, both a little crimped, and went aboard an hour later with sticky hands, sticky face, sticky dagger, and a mouth wanting to taste more of foreign shores.