Emperor of Thorns

When you’ve committed yourself to violence it takes an almost inhuman effort to stop short. It’s one of those things that once you’ve started need to be finished, rather like coitus, interrupting that’s a sin, even the priests say so. I stopped though, and Robart Hool didn’t wake. Charging in would likely provide a fresh corpse for the ghouls, and whatever friends might be accompanying them, to play with. But to raise the alarm might take us too far away, take too long, and let the invaders escape with whatever prize they came for.

Instead I ran Hool back up the corridor, up the steps, to the Short Bridge. He reached it breathing more heavily but not winded. In wall recesses to either side of the bridge lay silver panels with smooth silver buttons. Some combination of the buttons would raise the door, an implacable slab of Builder steel from which a thousand swords might be forged – one of the Ancrath treasures.

I’d never seen the door raised. No one had ever told me which buttons to push.

‘Father never dreamed the combination for you I suppose?’ I asked.

Katherine didn’t reply but Hool shuddered for her. I wondered if Father’s dreams were too dark for her to tread.

‘Fuck it.’

I drove Hool’s blade through the panel. The door slammed up with such speed that one of the balanced planks hadn’t time to fall away. It became splinters. Along the corridor behind me glow-bulbs flickered on in several places, creating islands of reddish light. In some distant place a siren started up, sounding for all the world like the voice of the Connath watchtower, though I doubted three strong men had taken to the winding handle of some similar device. This voice came more crisp, more clear, the work of a more ancient machine. Where the running and the stabbing and the crashing of steel doors had failed, this distant wailing started to undo my grip on Hool, peeling my fingers back one at a time, lifting him from sleep as if he were a diver in some dark sea now struggling for the shimmer of the surface. I pressed him down again, the action pushing me toward that surface, at once both close and far away. The sounds of the carriage started to leak into my ears, the creak of the frame, rumble of wheels, Gomst’s snores.

‘No.’

Hool and I ran back, bare feet slapping, following the turns as if remembering a waking dream that is slipping through your grasp even as you seize it.

Close now. One more corner.

Darts came hissing out of the darkness. One struck the oil lamp and glanced away. The other sunk into Hool’s chest, the thick pectoral muscle on the left. A small red circle grew around the black shaft of it.

Keep running. Keep dreaming.

Hool proved to be too fast on his feet and the line of sight too short for a second volley. He threw the lamp and raced after it rather than run while splashing oil with each step. The lamp shattered against the wall where the corridor turned, the bloom of fire silhouetting two ghouls, lurking at the corner, quick fingers pushing new darts into their blowpipes. He reached them as they drew breath for their shots. The swing of his sword destroyed both pipes. They moved swift and sure, these creatures, different from the dead men Chella set walking, corrupt but alive, once men perhaps but shaped by the poisons of the promised lands.

Both leapt for us, and Hool’s next slash opened one in the air, shoulder to hip, pale grey guts slopping out in a welter of black blood. The other bore him to the ground, talons in his shoulders, grey teeth filed to points snapping before his face. With the sword trapped between us and the ghoul Hool could do little but roll and push. The creature hadn’t much weight to it, maybe half of what a grown man might weigh, but its wiry limbs held a fearsome strength. Its breath stank of graves, and those teeth straining so hard to close on flesh put a horror in me even though it wasn’t my face it wanted to eat off the bone.

Desperation lent Hool the brute force needed to win free. He lifted himself off the ghoul using the sword between them as a bar. Its talons raked his shoulders, the blood spattering down across its chest. Panting and cursing Hool pinned the ghoul with his knees and turned the blade to skewer it through the neck.

He cast around, wild, lost. It occurred to me that despite the blood spilling down our chest, soaking scarlet into our nightshirt, I felt no pain.

‘Jorg! Wake up!’ Katherine’s voice in my ear, the warmth of her breath on my neck, the rumble of the carriage behind her.

No.

Hool turned to follow on.

No.

I pushed the image of the dart into his eyes, hanging to him by fingertips.

He reached to pull it free. The thing held tight, tenting his flesh around it as he tugged. Just a thorn! One sharp yank, rip it out barbs and all, let it bleed clean. And he did.

‘God damn it!’ He spat blood, looked around again. ‘Where the hell?’ I felt his lips move, felt Katherine shaking me half a thousand miles away.

Images from his dream got him moving again. Things he’d seen with his own sleeping eyes. The door sealing the vaults, a third ghoul, maybe more entering the Ancrath tombs. I fed him my anger too, burning against the numbness that would be tingling in his fingers by now.

Not so far ahead, the sound of a hammer striking iron, again and again.

Somehow I hung on as he ran, leaving the dying glow of the broken lamp behind us. A hard left into darkness and ahead of us, in the stolen burial chambers of the House of Or, another glow. Slower now. Slow, up the steps to Mother’s tomb, the intruders’ light catching gleams from Hool’s blade, still slick with the black blood of ghouls.

And there in the light of a single lantern, a third ghoul and three dead men, their stained flesh marked with the scale tattoos of Brettan sailors, all of them watching the fifth of their party, a pale man, black-cloaked, black-cowled, kneeling by the smaller of the two sarcophagi, chipping with hammer and chisel at the runes set around its lid.

To his credit Hool made no challenge or battle-cry. He moved in behind them without hesitation, lined up his swing, and carved halfway through the ghoul’s head. Even as Hool attacked I wondered at the dead men watching. The minds of such things are filled with the worst of what once lived there, and idle curiosity is not a sin, at least not one dark enough to return to a corpse. And yet they watched the tomb, avid, careless. Hool wrenched his blade free and hacked the head from the first of the dead men before the other two turned. Not a perfect swing, but he had some skill, did Master Hool and while his sword kept its fine-honed edge it would forgive him his minor errors.

The dead men came at him, faster than I had hoped. Released from their fascination with my brother’s tomb they proved a different proposition from the shambling dead more often encountered. Hool chopped the arm from one, taking it at the elbow. The dead man caught Hool’s sword arm in its remaining hand, and the second threw itself at his legs.

As Hool went down, the necromancer rose.

I may not have counted Robart Hool high in my esteem, but he died well. He took the sword from his trapped arm and rammed it left-handed through the neck of the corpse man falling to cover him.

Pinned by the one-armed corpse, grappled at the legs with the other dead man biting flesh from his thigh, Robart roared and fought to rise. The necromancer came in fast and touched cold fingers to the wrist of the hand straining to free the sword. All the fight left Robart. Not the pain, not the horror of the dead man’s teeth chewing at the tendon high on his thigh, but the fight. I knew what a necromancer’s touch could do.