• • •
“What the hell are unborn?” It took three days for me to ask the question. We’d come riding into the town of Pentacost, covering about a hundred miles from the border. Snorri still rode like a log, but fortunately he also endured like a log and hadn’t murmured a word of complaint. Rain found us on the road and poured on our heads for the last ten miles, so we came dripping from the stables and now sat at the centre of our own little lakes, steaming gently before an empty hearth in the King of Rhone tavern.
“You don’t know?” Snorri raised wet eyebrows at that and plastered his hair farther up his forehead, shaking the excess water from his fingers.
“No.” I’m often like that. I have a bad habit of blanking unpleasantness from my mind—something I’ve done since I was a child. Genuine surprise is a great help when faced with an unwelcome duty. Of course, when it’s the paying of debts you’re forgetting, that can lead to broken fingers. And worse. I guess it’s a form of lying—lying to oneself. And I’m very good at falsehoods. They often say the best liars half-believe their lies—which makes me the very best because if I repeat a lie often enough I can end up believing it entirely, no half measures involved! “No, I don’t know.”
During our travels, mainly down dull and muddy tracks and past innumerable dreadful little farms, I’d spent a lot of time reminiscing to myself about Cherri’s charms and Lula’s pleasing sense of exploration, but of the incident at the graves . . . nothing, just a brief memory of Cherri riding to the rescue. A dozen times I’d pictured the bouncing of her breasts as she’d thundered past. It took a three-hour soaking at the end of a three-day ride for the unborn to at last surface with a nagging insistence that finally made me ask. The truth could scarcely be worse than what my imagination had begun to suggest. I hoped.
“How can you not know?” Snorri demanded. He didn’t thump the table, but I knew he wanted to.
Snorri proved the ideal travelling companion for a man like me who didn’t want to dwell on past mistakes and the like. As far as Snorri was concerned all his goals, ambitions, loves, and dangers lay ahead—anything in our wake, Red March and all its peoples, Grandmother and her Silent Sister, the unborn, all these things of the South, were to be left behind, outpaced, no longer of concern or consequence.
“How can you not know?” he repeated.
“How can you not know what eleven times twelve is?”
“A hundred and thirty-two.”
Damn. “I’m just more interested in the finer things in life, Snorri. If you can’t ride it—one way or another—and it doesn’t play dice, or cards, or pour from a wine bottle, then I’m really not that bothered. Especially if it’s foreign. Or heathen. Or both. But this . . . thing . . . said something that worried me.”
“Quarry.” Snorri nodded. “It was sent after us.”
“By? The other day you said it might be the Dead King, but couldn’t it be someone else?” I wanted it to be someone else. “Some necromancer or—”
“The Dead King is the only one who can send the unborn anywhere. They laugh at necromancers.”
“So. This Dead King. I’ve heard of him.”
Snorri spread his hands, inviting more of my wisdom on the subject.
“A Brettan lord. Some godless island-hopper from the Drowned Lands.” I sipped my wine. A Rhonish red. Vile stuff, like vinegar and pepper. Other countries wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t crammed with foreigners and all their stuff. This Dead King was a case in point.
“That’s it? That’s what you know about the Dead King? ‘He’s from the Drowned Isles.’” It seemed to me that the steam was coming off Snorri rather more rapidly now.
I shrugged. “So why would some Brettan send a monster after us? How would he even know? I bet Maeres Allus put him up to it. Six will get you ten. Maeres Allus!”
“Ha!” Snorri drained his ale, wiped the foam from his moustache, and made to order another before remembering our poverty. “That, Jal, would be like a minnow ordering a whale. This Allus of yours is nothing. Get ten miles from the walls of your city and nobody knows the man.”
Prince Jalan, damn it! Ten miles outside my city and nobody knows I’m a prince. “So why send the monster?”
“The Dead King and this Silent Sister, they’re hidden hands, they play a game across the empire, them and others, pushing kings and lords across their board. Who knows what it is they want in the end? Perhaps to remake the empire and give it an emperor with strings by which he can be made to dance, or perhaps to wipe the board clear and start the game anew. In any event the unborn said we carried the Red Queen’s purpose, and then it said we carried magic. Which we do.” He jabbed a finger at my shoulder and that unpleasant crackling energy built immediately, remaining until he withdrew the offending digit.