Emperor of Thorns

‘Katherine?’ I knew her touch. Perhaps my show and tell of childish woe hadn’t scared her from my dreams as well as hoped. Perhaps like me she merely thought how stupid I had been to let old Bishop Murillo capture me in the first place. I have the church to thank for teaching me that last lesson in reading the signs, in seeing the trap rise around you, in never lowering your guard. A lesson that has served me well.

‘Katherine?’

A dark hall. I moved through bars of moonlight behind shuttered windows. My head turned for me, my fingers trailed the wall without asking permission. Familiar. All of it familiar, the hall, the smell of the place, the roughness of the wall, and of course, the being trapped in another’s head. Steps down, a long and winding stair.

‘This is like that night at the Haunt – when the Pope’s man came calling,’ I said, though no lips moved to speak my words.

The end of the stair. I turned a corner. Familiar, but not the Haunt. More steps down. My hand – his hand – took an oil lamp from its niche.

‘Katherine!’ I made my silent voice louder, more demanding.

‘Ssh! You’ll wake him, you idiot.’ Her voice seemed to come from a deep place.

‘Wake who?’

‘Robart Hool of course! Your spy back at the Tall Castle.’

A door. Hool’s fingers on the black iron of its handle.

‘If he’s my spy why are you using him?’ Espionage was never my forte but I had been rather proud of having a man so high in the king’s guard on my payroll. Until now.

‘Sageous opened him up to true-dreams,’ Katherine said from her well. ‘He sleepwalks and the castle guard know not to wake him or there can be trouble. He’s good with a sword. I use him so I can watch over Sareth when I’m not there.’

‘And now—’

‘Ssh!’

‘But—’

‘Shut. Up.’

Hool moved through the doorway and along a corridor, shadows swinging around him. We came to the Short Bridge, a yard of mahogany crossing over the recess from which a steel door could be summoned to seal the vaults. He crossed over and started down the steps beyond.

It grew colder. We were no longer in the keep of the Tall Castle but below it in a long Builder-made corridor that leads by zigs and zags through the upper vaults to an ancient annex excavated by the dear departed House of Or. Built to house their dead. Less ancient than the castle itself of course, but having the decency to wear its years more openly. In the tomb-vault the walls ran with cracks and in places the stone facings had fallen to reveal rough-hewn rock scarred by pick marks.

Hool’s feet slapped bare on cold stone, his nightclothes thin comfort against the subterranean chill, but his scabbard bumped against his legs, a better kind of comfort altogether. Sleepwalking or no, a swordsman always buckles on his blade. Makin taught him well, back in the days of wooden swords in the courtyard. I hope he’d learned the lesson I taught him too, that afternoon in the duelling square when I stepped outside the rules of the game and felled him with a punch to the throat.

Hool’s footsteps echoed and his breath steamed before him. When the Ancraths displaced the Ors my ancestors were quick to empty the mausoleum, turning out each sepulchre ready for fresher occupants. And in time we started to fill the place. The old statues were replaced, or sometimes just altered. With creditable economy and lack of sentiment my great-grandfather had the masons chip the moustache from the founder of the Or dynasty, reshape his nose a little, and stand over my great-great-grandfather’s corpse in passable representation of the man.

If Katherine used Hool to watch over Sareth, why were we in the tomb vault? Unless of course Sareth had died? What did Katherine want to show me? Another death to stain my hands? Or was she leading me to the place where she had me dragged on the day I returned from Gelleth, where she took me to keep my father from finishing what he started? Reminding me of the life I owed her? He would have cut my heart out if that had been required to stop it from beating, I know that much. Were we returning to Mother’s tomb?

The image of a sunlit surface woke in me. A surface high above me. The pressure of cold water. And floating from those depths came a memory that seemed less real now in the Tall Castle, in the house of the Ancrath dead, than it had in the mists of Gottering. My father was dead? I hadn’t spoken of it to anyone. Katherine had shown me ghosts were made of dreams. The lichkin could have lied to me – she must have been lying to me. That old man was too mean to die. Especially a soft death in the comfort of a bed. Was that where we were going? Had we come for that? To see him in his tomb?

We turned a corner to see a light vanishing around the next turn thirty yards ahead. I caught a glimpse of two men at the rear of the party before the corner took them. Something wrong about them – something familiar. The air held a sour reek.

People heading to the tombs. To where Mother and William lay beneath marble lids. Behind enchanted seals.

Hool sped up, no urgency in his movement, just a quicker pace, Katherine’s touch light enough not to wake him, firm enough for acceleration. At the next turn we had clear view of the last three figures. Each a thing of sunken flesh, stained dark, not by sun but by mire, hair lank and patched, hanging down across black rags. They carried pipes and darts. Mire-ghouls.

How would such creatures have penetrated the castle? Why hadn’t Katherine raised the alarm when she had the chance?

Another turn, the end of the Builder corridors, entering the decaying works of Or now.

Why hadn’t Katherine raised the alarm? Because that would wake Hool up and she’d lose her eyes in Ancrath, she wouldn’t know the reasons. And after all, reasons can be worth their weight in gold. Fexler had sent me to his tomb to put a proper end to his remains, to bring him into his full strength. The dead were not so different. Necromancers returned them to their flesh or bones to find their strength once more. But what drew them here?

Dust hushed Hool’s footsteps now. Unlike every other cellar in Crath City, mouldering and dank, some magic in the Builder foundations kept the vaults dry as bones. A parched and whispering place like the dry-lands where souls fall.

The oldest of my relatives lay furthest back, great-great-grandfather, great-grandfather, grandfather, wives, brothers, sisters, also lesser-born Ancraths who were, despite the cardinal sin of their birth, great champions. A horde of them, all but forgotten. Statued relics staring into dark infinity above old bones. But the glow came from a closer set of steps leading to a chamber better known to me.

Robart Hool’s fingers closed around the hilt of his sword.

‘Don’t! He’ll wake up!’ Katherine’s voice, in my ear or in his, I couldn’t tell.

The sword whispered from its sheath, a decent blade from the forge of Samath down by the Bridge of Change, runed for sharpness. Ahead of us the ghouls would be entering Mother’s tomb.

‘I won’t let him.’ Quite how I would stop Hool waking wasn’t something that concerned me. Perhaps just wanting it enough would make it happen in this world the Builders had left us. Though whatever Fexler said it seemed that wanting seldom made it so.

Katherine had set Hool striding – I made him sprint, whipping his sword in a figure eight to get a sense of its weight and balance. I don’t know quite how I worked his strings. It’s possible Katherine took pity on me and lent her strength, but I’ve found that when my blood kin are threatened, even when they’re dead already, my will takes on an edge.