Emperor of Thorns

I continued, ‘In fact I’d like to know what stops them, these scorched-earthers, from wiping the slate clean? Does a war rage in all the Builder relics, humming to themselves in the dusts of the promised lands, scattered and hidden in cellars, secreted in luggage … ?’

Michael’s eyes were the least convincing part of his illusion, as though something wholly alien watched me through two holes punched into a man’s face. I wondered what the real Michael had been like, and how far a thousand years had moved this creature from its starting template.

‘It’s very easy to kill most of the people,’ Michael said. ‘And very hard to kill absolutely all of them. To do so would require a consensus, cooperation between all, or almost all, of my people. Rather like Congression. Perhaps on the day you finally elect a replacement for your dead emperor you should start to worry that my kind might find a similar unity of purpose.’

‘And what of Fexler Brews?’ I would play a closer hand here. Fexler spoke of a third way, and neither of the first two were to my liking.

‘Brews?’ It heartened me to see the Builder ghost sneer. At least that much humanity persisted in the data echo. ‘A servant, barely more than a maintenance algorithm. He is free to act now, but after a millennium on the margins of our world he is hardly the spokesman for you to listen to. Would you want me to judge you by the man who winds open your gate to let me in?’

As I swayed through the Margins, only a little more easy in my saddle than Marco lurching on the mount ahead of me, I knew Fexler Brews for what he was. A glorified gatekeeper with delusions of grandeur.

The Margins of the Sahar Desert are a vast and barren wilderness of cracked mud. A fissured geometry stretches across these lands, repeating at ever-larger scales, dust-blown, unbroken by mountain, lake, tree, or bush. In places the cracks are paper-thin, elsewhere you might stick your arm down them, and there are others still that would swallow a camel. Twisted creatures skulk in the fissures, hiding from the sun at surprising depths where the mud still remembers ancient rains. In the darkness they emerge.

Our train comprised six score camels and fifty men to ride them, the desert Moors or Taureg as they called themselves. Most of the Taureg were traders, or drovers like Omal in their employ. They sold goods from the Port Kingdoms in Hamada, and returned with salt blocks. The salt they purchased from factors who in turn bought it from the Salash, almost-men, capable of enduring the oven heat of the deep Sahar where even the hardiest of Moorish tribes could not travel.

Along with the merchants and their workers, a dozen Ha’tari accompanied us, warriors from a mercenary clan of great repute. They slouched on their mounts by day, dead to the world, and earned their keep at night, driving off predators that emerged from the cracked landscape.

On the first night of our journey around the camel-dung fires of Taureg we sat with our backs to the night and sipped hot java from cups no bigger than thimbles. I still hated the stuff but the expense made it an insult to refuse. The stars gave more light than the fire, a white-hot blaze of them across the sky. The Moors chattered in their harsh tongue, and in whispers I quizzed Marco. The discovery that not only was I known to the Builder-ghosts, but knew of them, had moderated his opinions somewhat and if he still held me in contempt at least he made some effort to disguise the fact.

‘Ibn Fayed must know we’re coming,’ I said. ‘He made efforts to thwart us, and yet he allows our progress now. Surely a dozen Ha’tari aren’t going to stop his men?’

‘Clearly his objections to my audit are not sufficiently large to incur the bad feeling that slaughtering a Taureg salt caravan would engender. Those objections were, however, large enough to motivate efforts to deny me transport.’ Marco sipped his java, sucking it through his teeth.

‘And he has no objections to my visit?’

A large dung beetle scurried over my boot. Eight legs, a mutant. For a moment little Gretcha watched me from the fire-glow. I scowled and the fire flared then dimmed, causing the drovers to shift back, muttering.

‘Your visit? Why should he even know of it?’ Marco’s permanent frown deepened.

‘Yusuf knew of it.’

‘And what is Lord Yusuf to you or me?’

For someone who dragged the means to speak to a Builder ghost around with him, Marco seemed to know very little.

‘Yusuf is a mathmagician.’

Marco raised an eyebrow at that. ‘Abominations, all of them. But Ibn Fayed doesn’t own such creatures. They have their own agendas. Don’t think the only reason the numbered men may seek you is in the caliph’s service.’

Beneath my travel cloak I toyed with the view-ring, rotating it through my fingers. A thought struck, a bolt from the diamond-scattered night, piercing me skull to toes. The fingers around the ring closed in a grip that might have crushed it if it were only a little less robust.

‘Why do you have to drag that trunk with you, Marco? Why is it so damn heavy?’

The banker blinked at me.

‘It weighs more than the two of us!’ I said.

He blinked again. ‘How heavy should it be?’

I clutched the view-ring and thought back to a time when it had taken both Gorgoth and Rike to carry a work of the Builders from a vault deep beneath the Castle Red.

The trip through the Margins took three days, our journey punctuated by the crossing of the widest fissures on a bridge of three planks, carried for the purpose, laid down and picked up, time and again. We travelled without landmarks, beset with dust storms, always too dry, always too hot. At one point we passed the carcass of a vast beetle, its hollowed carapace large enough to stable camels. In three days those remains were the only thing to break the monotony of flat, cracked, mud.

The desert announced itself as ripples on the horizon. With remarkable speed the hardpan and dust gave over to sand, rising in white dunes to heights I would not have imagined possible.

In the desert the Tauregs’ skills became obvious. The way they navigated, counting the dunes as if they were landmarks rather than identical shifting masses. The way they trekked up the lee of each white mountain, threading the path of least resistance, finding the firm-packed sand for good-footing, finding the best respite from the wind, and in the evening, blessed intervals of shade.

An unease rose in me. Each mile took us further into a prison. Neither Marco or I could leave again without the goodwill of men such as these: the desert trapped us better than high walls.

The white sands multiplied the sun’s heat and made a furnace in which we cooked. Marco made no concession to the temperature, wearing all his blacks, the frockcoat, waistcoat, his white gloves. I began to think him changed, like the Salash of the deep Sahar. No human could endure as he did. And beneath his tall hat his skin stayed paste-white and unburned.

By night, shivering beneath the cold blaze of the heavens, we sat among the merchants with the dunes rising all about, ghost pale, huger than the waves on the roughest sea. On such nights the merchants would tell their tales in murmured phrases, so little animation in them that it was hard to tell who spoke behind their shesh, until at some punch-line the storyteller would start to wave his hands and the whole circle joined in with harsh jabber and raucous laughter. Behind us in the drover circle the men played the game of twelve lines on ancient boards, silent save for the chatter of dice. And around the fire circles, phantoms in the night, walked the Ha’tari, passing a low and haunting song between them, and guarding us from dangers unknown.