Emperor of Thorns

I set the words here in Afrique-ink, dark as the secrets they ground up to make it. My hand traces its path across the whiteness of the page and the black trail of my days can be followed. Followed from the day I shook that snow globe, and understood that sometimes the only change to matter must be worked from without. Followed from that day to this day – this day that woke with the morning sun over Vyene, with the blue Danoob flowing silent and swift through the heart of the Unbroken Empire.

Little Will runs into the room. He comes often now, though his mother tells him not to.

‘Jorg!’ he says, and I appear.

‘Yes.’

‘You’re not my daddy. Marten says so.’

‘I’m a memory of him. And men are made of memories, Will.’ It’s the best I have to tell him.

‘Uncle Rike says you’re a ghost.’

‘Uncle Rike is something that fell from a horse’s backside, crudely fashioned into the shape of an ugly man,’ I say.

Will giggles at that. Then serious, ‘But you’re white like a ghost. Nana Wennith says you can see through ghosts and I can see—’

‘Yes, my emperor,’ I say. ‘I am a ghost. A data-ghost, an extrapolation, a compilation. A billion moments captured. Your father lived much of his life in a building made a thousand years ago.’

‘The Tall Castle.’ He smiles. ‘I’ve been there!’

‘A building with many ancient eyes and many ancient ears. And in later life he carried a special ring. He watched through it, and it watched him. A man … a ghost, called Fexler, needed to understand your father, needed to know if he could be trusted to save the world.’

‘He wanted to know if he was good enough,’ Will says.

I hesitate and hide my smile. ‘He wanted to know if Jorg was the right man. So he did what machines do when they have a complicated question to answer. He built a model. And that model is me.’

‘I wish I had my real father,’ Will says. He is only six. Tact may yet arrive.

‘I wish you did too, Will,’ I say. ‘I’m only an echo and I feel only an echo of the love he would have had for you. But it’s a very loud echo.’

He smiles and I know then that not all magic is gone from the world. The kind that burns – that has gone. Men will no longer fly, or cheat death of its due. But a deeper, older, and more subtle enchantment persists. The kind that both breaks and mends hearts and has always run through the marrow of the world. The good kind.

Will grins again and runs out of the room. Small boys have little patience. I watch the doorway through which he ran, and wonder what might come through it next. I could predict of course. I could build a model. But where would the fun be in that now?

One thing I do know is that it won’t be Jorg of Ancrath who walks in through that doorway. Men are supposed to be scared of ghosts, not ghosts of men. A man may fear his own shadow, but here is a pale shadow that fears the man who cast him. Jorg of Ancrath will not return though. The magic has been shut off, enchantment has run from the world. Death is, once again, what it was.

I watch the door but no one comes. I make Miana sad. She spends her time watching the young emperor grow. Katherine thinks me a nothing, just numbers trying to count themselves, trying to measure a man who was beyond measures, perhaps beyond her dreams even. I watch the door then give up. Fexler will watch it for me. He watches them all.

Instead I sink down into the deep and endless seas of the Builders. Wheels within wheels, worlds within worlds, possibilities without end.

All of us have our lives. All of us our moment, or day, or year. And Jorg of Ancrath assuredly had his, and it has been my place to tell it.

He has gone beyond me now though, and I have no more to say. Perhaps somewhere Jorg and his brother have found the real heaven and are busy giving them hell. It pleases me to think so.

But the story is done.

Finis

An afterthought

If you’ve got this far then you will have read three books and several hundred thousand words on the life and times of Jorg Ancrath. It will now be apparent that you’re not going to be reading any more – and you might, with some justification, wonder why I have chosen to shoot what could well have been a cash cow squarely between the eyes.

The easiest and best answer is that the story demanded it. I acknowledge that I could have told the story to go jump off a bridge and turned events in a direction that allowed me to produce a book 4, a book 5, 6 etc. In years to come when I’m eating cat food cold from the tin I may wish that I had. The truth is though, that I wanted you to part company with Jorg on a high. I would rather readers finish book 3 wanting more than wander away after book 6 feeling they have had more than enough. There is a tendency for characters who march on past their sell-by date to become caricatures of themselves – to tread the same ground, growing more stale with each step. I hope Jorg avoided that fate and that together we’ve built something of worth.