Emperor of Thorns

Tonight though, the dream came cold and clear. Broken stone crunched beneath my shoes, the rain lashed me. I climbed a slope, bent against the gale. My fingers moved blind across natural rock, a wall rising before me. I knew every sensation but held no control as if I were a puppet and another kept the strings.

‘What lesson is this, Katherine?’

She never spoke to me. Just as I never fought her – she never spoke. At first the dreams she wrought on me were all anger and revenge. Still they often carried that edge but I thought also that she experimented, trained her talent – as a swordsman crafts his technique and adds new strokes to his repertoire. These had been Sageous’s skills and now that my aunt kept once more beneath Father’s roof it might be she filled the heathen’s role, though whether like him she spread a subtle web of influence and with touches turned the Hundred along Olidan Ancrath’s paths, or indeed her own, I didn’t know.

The storm fell away without warning and the wind died, though I heard it moaning behind me. A cave of some sort. I had passed through the narrow mouth of a cave. I crouched and swung the pack from my shoulder. Sure fingers found a flint and tinder. Within moments I lit the lantern fished from a pocket within the bag. I would have been proud of my work, but the hands that carried it out, the hands I held the flint in and struck flame with, were not mine. The lantern showed them to be pale, like flesh too long under water, and long-fingered. I have long fingers, but these were white spiders, crawling in the lantern’s shadows.

I moved on, or rather the man whose skin I shared moved on and bore me with him. The lantern’s glow reached out and found little to return it. My vision stayed where directed by the owner of the eyes I watched through – on the floor for the most part, natural rock smoothed by the passage of many feet. An occasional glance to the left and right showed waterfalls of frozen stone and unearthly galleries where stalagmites reached up to stalactites. And I knew where I walked. The Haunt’s eastern sally port. The pale man had climbed the Runyard in the dark of the storm and entered the sally port through the concealed slot high on the Runyard’s flank.

The man moved with confidence. Although many twists and turns led off to dark unknowns it took no special skill to find the way, polished as it was by countless predecessors. The dream seemed accurate, drawing on my memories to make substance. A shiver ran through me, though not through the pale man. If Katherine strove for accuracy then soon a black hand would close around the intruder, reaching from the shadow, and pull him with inexorable strength and merciful speed into the gaping maw of a troll. I hoped not to feel those black teeth close in my flesh, but it seemed likely. Already their stink hung in my nose and his collar chafed my neck.

He walked his path and no hand came reaching. If I had been able to hold a breath I would have let it sigh through my teeth. For a while the dream had convinced me I was there, but no; Gorgoth’s trolls guarded the subterranean paths to the Haunt and many more secret routes besides.

We came now through hand-hewn tunnels, gouged into the rock to join the Haunt to the natural caves. The man stopped, not far from the lowest of the Haunt’s cellars. Ahead a clot of darkness swallowed the lantern light and gave nothing back. For long moments he held still, no motion in him, almost inhuman in his lack of twitch or tremor. When he advanced he moved on swift feet, the hilt of a knife cool in his grip though I couldn’t see the blade. A single troll lay across the rough stone, sprawled out with its long limbs reaching. The beast’s face nestled, hidden against the black knob of its shoulder. It might have been dead, but with careful observation the pale man and I saw the slow rise and fall of its back as breath came and went.

Without haste the man stepped around the sleeping troll, ducking where the tunnel’s roof curved low, picking his way over black legs.

‘A poor dream, Katherine.’ I spoke without needing his lips. ‘Trolls are made for war. It’s written through them. This man’s scent would have woken a dozen by now and set their mouths running with hunger.’

My escort found the wooden door that gives onto the Haunt’s wine cellars. He worked the lock with heavy picks suited to such an old and solid mechanism. A drop of oil to take any squeak from the hinges and he pushed it open, stepping through without hesitation. I caught sight of his knife then, an assassin’s tool, long and thin, its handle of turned white bone.

He emerged from the false front of the huge barrel that disguised the exit. Propped against a real barrel, opposite the false one and of nearly equal size, a guardsman in my colours sat, helm to one side, legs stretched in front of him, head forward in slumber. I crouched before him. I felt my haunches settle on my heels, I felt the strain in the muscles of my thighs, the coarseness of the guard’s dirty blond hair as I pulled his head back. I knew him. The name fluttered behind my thoughts. Rodrick, a little fellow, younger than me, I once found him hiding in my tower when Arrow besieged the castle. My knife lay cold against his throat now, and still he didn’t stir. I’d half a mind to open his neck just for being such a useless guard. Even so it came as a shock when my hand slipped lower and drove the blade into his heart. That woke him! Rodrick watched me with hurt eyes, mouth twisting but silent, and he died. I waited. All trace of motion left the boy but still I waited. And then I pulled the knife free. Very little blood flowed. I wiped my blade clean on his tunic.

The pale man had black sleeves. I noticed that much before his gaze found the stairs and he went to them. He left his lantern beside Rodrick and his shadow led the way.

The man walked through the Haunt’s corridors and halls as if he belonged there. The castle lay in darkness with only the occasional lamp set to light a corner or doorway. Shutters rattled, shaken by the wind, rainwater pooled below, driven past lintels and running over stone floors. It seemed my people huddled in their beds while the storm howled, for none of them wandered, no servant tending lamps, no dun-man for the night-soil, not a nursemaid or guardsman’s harlot slipping from the barracks … not a guardsman come to that.

At last, as the assassin reached the internal door to the east tower, we found a guard who hadn’t abandoned his post. Sir Graeham, knight of my table, asleep on his feet, held upright by a combination of plate armour, a halberd, and the wall. Pale hands positioned the long knife at the gap between gorget and shoulderplate. The assassin set the heel of his palm over his knife’s bone hilt, positioned so a sharp blow would puncture both leather and chainmail, and find the jugular beneath. He paused, perhaps sharing my thought that the knight might create quite a clatter if he fell. We held, close enough that I could draw Sir Graeham’s ripe stink in with each breath. The wind howled and I drove the knife home. Its hilt stung the hand that wasn’t mine, the business end stung Sir Graeham worse, and he fell, twitching. His weight pulled him from the knife.

Again the assassin cleaned his blade. This time on the knight’s red cloak, smearing it with a brighter shade. Fastidious, this one.

He found the key on Graeham’s belt and unlocked the oak door, iron-bound and polished by the touch of hands. Old as the door was, the archway held more years. My uncle’s scrolls spoke of a time when the Haunt was nothing but the east tower, a single watchtower set on the mountain’s shoulder with a military camp about its base. And even those men, who fought the tribes of Or and forged a stronghold in the Highlands, did not build the tower. There is writing on that arch, but time has forgotten even the name of the script. Its meaning has passed beyond knowing.