Emperor of Thorns

‘Does your son make you happy, Jorg?’ The question felt important. Jorg Ancrath with a baby boy. Chella tried to picture him with the infant in his arms.

Jorg flashed a dark look her way. He bowed his head, shielded by the hair that swept about his face, and for the longest time she thought he would not reply.

‘There are no happy endings for such as us, Chella. No redemption. Not with our sins. Any joy is borrowed – laughter shared on the road, and left behind.’ He turned to Kai. ‘I have killed children, Kai Summerson. In such company you will too.’ Something familiar lay in his voice, in the framing of his words. She could almost taste it.

Returning his gaze to Chella Jorg watched her face awhile, sorrow in his own. ‘We have both walked black paths, lady. Don’t think that mine leads back into the light. Of all those that tried to guide me, of my father, of the whispers from the thorn bush, of Corion’s evil council, the darkest voice was ever mine.’

And in a moment of recognition Chella knew who the Dead King was.

38

When Makin reported the Isles’ contingent catching up our own golden host I had known Chella would be amongst their number. Known it blood to bone, without evidence or reason. And I left our carriage, my wife, my child, my tantalizing aunt, with more swiftness than was seemly, and with less trepidation than when I went to my father’s carriage, though this one might hold the Dead King himself. I closed the door on them all, on all my weaknesses. Despite my tempering of years some foolish part of me still reached for the happiness of family, the redemption love might bring. Broken hopes that would not serve me. I closed the door on them and rode toward what I knew best – toward the damned. My past lay black, the future burned, and in the thin slice between, the world expected me to be a father, to hold a son, to save him, save them all? Too much to ask of a man so dark with sin. Too much to ask of any man perhaps.

The Dead King’s carriage, whilst not so grand as Lord Holland’s, had nothing funereal about it. Even the presence of two necromancers hadn’t tainted the atmosphere. In fact I didn’t know for sure if Kai Summerson practised the arts of reanimation: he seemed too young, too full of life. And Chella herself had changed. Beyond a doubt. In past encounters she had burned with an unholy joy, so fierce that its light became an after-image on the memory, obscuring truth. In the swamps and caverns an ambiguity of the flesh made her all things to all men, or at least to this one, ripe with the darkest juice. Now it seemed that a stranger sat opposite me, more old, more pale, still with a beauty to her, hair very black, high and delicate angles to her face, an elegance not seen before, her eyes dark with secrets and in unguarded moments becoming wounds.

‘I still mean to kill you,’ I said, in part to pass the time as we rumbled through the streets of Honth.

She shrugged, less easy in her indifference than of old. ‘The Nuban forgave me. You should too.’

That made me start. ‘He did not!’ But he probably did. The Nuban never held grudges – said he had enough to carry and a long way to go.

‘So, tell me about the Dead King.’ I asked Kai and he shuddered at the words. Just for a moment, quickly suppressed.

The Brettan looked out of the window before he answered, as if seeking the reassurance of daylight, comfort in the passing of narrow homes in plaster and thatch, each stuffed with lives, mother, father, squalling brats, toothless elders, bristling with argument and laughter, every flea hopping.

‘The Dead King is the future, King Jorg. He closed his hand around the Drowned Isles and soon he’ll reach out for the world. He rules in the deadlands, and we all will spend longer dead than we do living.’

‘But who is he, Chella? What is he? Why the interest in Ancrath?’ She knew something. Perhaps she would tell me in the hope it would make me suffer.

‘Ancrath is the gateway to the continent, Jorg. You’re a clever boy, you should know that.’

‘Why me?’ I asked.

‘You make a lot of people take notice. Destroying mountains, holding huge armies at your gates. All very grand. And of course the Dead King knows you have your eye on Ancrath. It’s bad enough that your father proves so stubborn in his resistance, to have the son there in his place would be worse still, maybe?’

‘Hmmm.’ It sounded plausible, but I didn’t believe her. ‘And surely this Dead King can’t think to win friends at Congression? He expects diplomacy? Negotiations with dead things crawled from slime and dust?’

Chella smiled to herself, a gentle thing that made her pretty. ‘There are worse monsters at the emperor’s court, Jorg. The Queen of Red is on the road to Congression. The Silent Sister with her, to advise, and Luntar out of Thar with them. You’ve met Luntar I understand?’

‘Just once.’ I had no memory of him, but we had met. He had given me that copper box, and filled it. ‘They might be monsters, perhaps worse than me, but they are born of women, they live, they will die. Tell me, where has this Dead King come from? Don’t the dry-lands slope ever down? Don’t they reach hell? Has he escaped Lucifer and climbed from the abyss?’

‘He’s no demon.’ Chella made a slow shake of her head, as if it might have been better to have a risen demon among us. ‘And what happens here, in the mud and dirt of this world, matters very much to him. Heaven, hell, and earth, three that are one – there can be no change above or below that isn’t mirrored here. This world, where our lives are spent, is both a lock and a lever. That is what the Dead King says.’

‘And doesn’t the Devil object to this vagrant camping on his very doorstep? Stealing what is his?’ It seemed absurd to be debating the politics of hell, but I had reached into the dead-lands with my own hands, tasted the air, and I knew them to be a path to Lucifer’s door.

‘The Dead King plans to break open the gates of heaven,’ Kai said. ‘You think that he cares what else may come?’

‘Everything is changing, Jorg.’ Chella bowed her head. ‘Everything.’

‘You still haven’t told me where he came from, this messiah of yours. Why don’t the ancients speak of him? In what books is he recorded?’ I asked, still hoping for grains of truth in her lies and madness. ‘How old is he?’

‘Young, Jorg. Very young. Younger than you.’

39

Chella’s Story

The bridge at Tyrol spanned the Danoob in seventeen arches, a broad carriageway riding across stone pillars. The great bridge back at Honth had leaped the Rhyme in one breath-taking arc, but Chella liked the Tyrol bridge better. She could imagine it being built, see in her mind’s eye the men who laboured here.

‘How does the river look to you, Chella?’ Jorg watched close for her answer.

‘Brown and churning.’ She reported it faithfully. ‘What do you see, Kai?’

Kai half stood, peering through the window grille, swaying with the motion of the carriage. ‘Brown.’

‘Are there no lovers amongst us?’ Jorg asked. ‘The legend that the waters look blue to those in love is older than this bridge.’

‘The river is brown. Shit brown. It’s a matter of silt and drainage and the sewers of Tyrol, not of the sick-making fantasies that people want to wrap their fucking in.’ Chella saw no reason to keep the sourness to herself.