Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3) (36 page)

I watched Ibn Fayed, deep in the grasp of his throne, so clearly a warrior despite his silks. He met my gaze, eyes hard and black. Of an age with the Earl Hansa, the years had grizzled him, a beard cropped so close as to be little more than stubble trekked white across the darkness of his skin, reaching for his cheekbones.

‘I came to kill him for the disrespect shown to my grandfather.’

That reached him. For a moment his eyes widened. No need of a translator to whisper behind his throne – he knew my meaning.

Where my honesty won a moment of surprise from the caliph it almost set his Voice back on the cushions. For the longest moment he stood slack-jawed and staring. Not a twitch from the guards though – they heard only the gabble of a northman.

Ibn Fayed muttered something and the thin man found his tongue.

‘And is that still your intention, King Jorg?’

‘No.’

Another mutter then, ‘You no longer believe you can achieve your goal?’

‘I doubt I could escape afterward. I think the desert would defeat me,’ I said, drawing a grunt of amusement from the caliph. ‘Also, I have gained new perspective on the matter and think perhaps that there is a third way.’

‘Explain.’ The Caliph’s Voice clearly knew his master’s ways well enough not to require a prompt at every turn. His terse command convinced me that he truly was to be treated as nothing more than a conduit, speaking exactly as Ibn Fayed would if he cared to raise his voice.

‘By coming close to the source of the attacks upon my grandfather’s house I have gained distance from the Castle Morrow. Even the Horse Coast has grown small from so far away.’ I thought of Lord Nossar in his map room at Elm, inking back the faded and forgotten lines on ancient charts, laying claims that would see Martin’s son and little girl into the ground. ‘I see that actions taken at such a remove may still be those of an honourable man though when viewed from the halls of my grandfather’s castle they cry for justice and retribution. I see that the Prince of Arrow was right when he told me to travel, to meet the peoples against whom I might make war.’

‘And if assassination was the first way, what are the second and the third?’ asked the Voice.

‘The second way is war. For my grandfather to turn the wealth of his lands into more ships, a greater navy to scour the coasts of Liba.’ I didn’t speak of invasion. While the Moors might find a foothold along the Horse Coast it seemed to me that the lands of Afrique would swallow armies whole without the need for the natives to do more than wait for the sun to work its will. ‘The third way is alliance.’

Now Fayed laughed out loud. ‘My people have ruled here four thousand years.’ His voice so dry it almost creaked. He waved at the thin man who carried on without pause.

‘A chain of civilization stretching back unbroken across millennia. And you come here ragged, empty-handed? Only through the knowing of the mathema do we recognize you as king. It is true that charts render small what may hold many lives, but in our map room Renar may be found only after careful search and can be covered with the thumb.’ He made the appropriate gesture, as if squashing my kingdom like a bug. ‘Whereas a man may scarcely cover Liba with his hand.’ The thin man spread his fingers. And with the hand still raised, open and turned toward me, ‘There is a saying in the desert. Don’t reach for friendship with an empty hand.’

‘What would the Earl Hansa pay to have you back, boy?’ Fayed’s croak from the throne.

I made the least of bows. ‘My hand only looks empty, Ibn Fayed.’ I didn’t know what my grandfather might pay, but I guessed Fayed would ask for more than coin. Even if I survived the negotiations, to return dragging such a failure with me would undo any ties I had made in Morrow.

‘What then does it hold?’ the Voice asked.

‘Tell me, Excellency, did you need your magicians to tell you I was coming?’

The Voice bridled at being questioned, anger written into the sharp lines of his face. Fayed made the briefest wave and the answer came, calm and without offence. ‘Hamada is a fortress that needs no walls. Only by caravan can the dunes be crossed. And rest assured that all who travel the salt roads are known in this palace before they come in sight of the city. Known by name and feature, their cargo known, down to the last fig in their saddlebags.’

‘And if you knew of my approach you would know also of my travelling companion,’ I said.

‘Marco Onstantos Evenaline of the House Gold, Mercantile Derivatives South. A Florentine banker.’

‘He is waiting at your gates, Caliph. Why is he here?’

Again the wave to quell his Voice’s objections. When a man doesn’t bother to keep secrets from you, you know that you’re in trouble.

‘He comes to claim against a contract. Our payment for an old debt sunk off the Corsair Isle. Though the Florentines had agents aboard and had taken the monies into their care they say that under the agreed terms no payment is properly transacted until docked in Port Vito.’

‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘And although his visit is not welcomed or encouraged, you afford him the protections and diplomatic privileges agreed for the clans under empire law.’

‘Yes.’

‘And those old agreements might allow him a secret fig or two in his saddlebag … Perhaps you should bring him in and I could show you what’s in my hand …’

The Voice had no answer. A long silence, nothing but the wafting of feathers as Ibn Fayed considered. The faintest of nods.

‘He will be summoned.’

Our audience proved less private than advertised for no further order was issued. And yet I assumed it was being acted upon.

‘An interesting cat you have there, Excellency.’ I don’t count small talk amongst my skills but we couldn’t just watch each other for the next ten minutes waiting on Marco.

‘A leopard,’ the Voice replied. ‘From the interior.’

A long pause. I’m really not good at idle chat.

‘So you’re destroying all the Builders’ works? I’m interested in hearing the reasons why.’

‘It is no secret.’ The Voice looked uncomfortable even so. ‘The caliph’s proclamations have been called out after prayers across Liba for close on a year now. This new wisdom came to him in a dream at the end of the Holy Month. On the Day of A Thousand Suns there came a dawn so bright that many of our ancestors who died that morning could not see the way to paradise. They sought the darkness of their machines to hide from that unholy light. But they became trapped there, djinns, haunting the relics of their past. It is out of mercy that we act. We break open their prisons and set them free to ascend to their reward.’

He delivered his lines with conviction. Whether he believed them, or whether he could have made a great actor, I didn’t know.

‘Let us hope those trapped souls understand the mercies that you heap upon them,’ I said. ‘And whose idea was it? Some scheme out of the mathema?’

‘Mine.’ Ibn Fayed laid the claim from his throne, his hands closing into fists.

A distant, hollow sound, repeated, and again. I glanced back along the silk runner to see the doors open. Marco Onstantos Evenaline stepped through, in his blacks as ever, but with his hat in his hand. He must have been plucked from the line shortly after we passed him and have followed in our footsteps.

We all watched his slow advance across the width of the hall. Ibn Fayed really did have a hell of a throne room. It occurred to me that a large portion of the Haunt would fit into it, and certainly the entirety of the villages of Gutting and Little Gutting.

At last Marco drew up alongside me, looking pleased for the first time since we met. The absence of his trunk had changed him, he stood taller, more proud.

‘Ibn Fayed, Caliph of Liba, Lord of the Three Realms, Water-Giver, welcomes Marco Onstantos Evenaline of the House Gold, Mercantile Derivatives South to his humble abode.’

‘As well he should,’ Marco said. ‘Though courtesies will prove no shield from the consequences of his actions.’

‘You dare?’ The Voice may have spoken an alien tongue but the volume and tone drew ten curved blades from the scabbards of the imperial guard.

‘Harsh language to use over an unpaid debt, Marco?’ I did my best to ignore the glittering steel a foot to my left, the guardsmen having included me in the insult. ‘By the look of things I would say the caliph is good for it?’ I didn’t wave my arm at the opulence of our surroundings, concerned that someone might lop it off.

‘You wallow in ignorance, Jorg of Renar, like a pig in filth. It will please me to see you burn.’

‘Marco! I thought we were friends?’ I tried not to smile but I was never the actor.

He looked away from me toward the throne. ‘Ibn Fayed, you are sentenced to die. All of Hamada is forfeit.’

Two long steel bolts appeared in Marco’s chest, jutting out at diverging angles. I took a moment to recognize them as projectiles, fired from some overlarge crossbows that must be concealed in galleries above us.

Marco staggered half a step and raised his hands. ‘Die.’ Joints crackled as he formed a fist. It put me in mind of that scorpion in the Hills as I unwound it. For a heartbeat he hypnotized all of us, stood there impaled on those bolts, his hat rolling on its brim at his feet. Fist slammed into palm.

And nothing.

Though perhaps it seemed brighter for a second, as if the sun had peeked out from behind clouds.

Marco pounded fist into palm a second time. ‘No!’ He swept us with a wild gaze, looked down at the shafts in his chest, and collapsed.

‘This is what is in your hand?’ the Voice asked. ‘A madman?’

‘Look out of your window, Ibn Fayed.’ I pointed west.

A sharp clap sent one of the guards running to haul open the shutters.

The man pulled on a concealed rope and the screens parted, the brightness of the day dazzling us. For long moments we stood blinking in the desert light, trying to see into the brilliance of the outside world. And there it rose, boiling upward over the dunes, a fierce column of orange and black, fire threaded with night, opening into a inferno, mushrooming above the sands, and above that, impossibly high, a white halo of cloud spreading, outpacing the flames.

The burned half of my face pulsed with warmth, a heat on the edge of pain, the light of it filling my eye and making something new of the flame-cloud, lending it an ethereal beauty and the aspect of a gate, or fissure in the world, opening onto something that could be heaven or could be hell.

‘It would take you two days on camel back to stand dead centre beneath that explosion,’ I said.

‘I don’t understand.’ Ibn Fayed stood from his throne.

‘Have Marco’s trunk brought here,’ I said.

The caliph nodded. His Voice called out the command.

We had no need of small talk while we waited. The explosion demanded the eye. None of us spoke. Even the servants laid down their feathered poles to watch. And after five minutes we saw the dunes rise, the sand leaping into the air, one after the next, bang, bang, bang, faster than an arrow in flight. The sound hit us, a wall of it, loud enough to take every shutter from its hinges and leave a finger’s width of sand across each inch of the marble floor. The rumble that followed drew out for an age, deep and full of terror.

Qalasadi and Yusuf came through the great doors, six guards behind them carrying Marco’s trunk. If they knocked we didn’t hear them.

They set the trunk beside Marco’s corpse.

‘You have checked this?’ The Voice pointed at it.

‘We have.’ Qalasadi nodded. ‘In any event, nothing of the Builders’ magic can pass the gates and seals set upon this palace.’

‘That’s n—’ I bit off the words and patted my chest. Gone! The view-ring wasn’t there. ‘How in hell—’

‘I cut the thong just before we left the mathema,’ Yusuf said. ‘Kalal stayed to pick it from the floor.’

‘A light touch, Brother Yusuf. I hadn’t taken you for a thief.’ It unnerved me to think he had held a blade at my neck, but I supposed they had had me in a noose since I set foot on the quay at Kutta port.

‘Theft is about timing, Jorg, and timing can be calculated.’ He seemed unashamed.

I remembered the bell sounding as we left the tower, holding my attention, drowning out other senses, over-writing the clink of view-ring striking floor.

‘Besides,’ Yusuf continued. ‘It would have been detected and taken at the palace gates, casting you in a very bad light. A friend couldn’t let that happen to a friend.’

I shrugged. There seemed little else to do. In any event, they hadn’t detected my gun. Perhaps when they spoke of the Builders’ works they meant the ones with more magic and less mechanics. The ones where lightning ran trapped in metal veins.

‘Open it.’ Ibn Fayed, returned to his throne, gaze flicking from window to trunk, trunk to window.

Qalasadi kneeled, undid the catches, worked some magic on the lock – a lock I knew to be very tricky – and threw back the lid.

‘Sand?’ The caliph leaned forward.

The desert taught me many things. Two of those things were about Marco. The desert is a quiet place. Not silent. There is always the wind, the hiss of sand, the plod of feet, and the complaint of camels. But it is a place where a man can be heard and where a man can listen. When I listened to Marco I noticed that he whirred, he creaked, and he ticked. All these sounds existed on the edge of hearing, but once noted could be found in any quiet moment, especially if he exerted himself, then I would hear it more clearly, that whirring, like the cogs in my watch.

And in discovering this strangeness I found myself watching Marco Onstantos Evenaline, the white man in his black suit, unburned by the sun, sweating but never wilting, a man curiously unsuited to what should be, excluding the harshness of ledgers, a business of warm handshakes and human bonding.

The second thing I learned at night, watching the infinite stars. I noticed that they shimmered. Only to be expected of course. Stars twinkle. But it seemed to me, in the dead of night, with the sands about us cooled and the air cold enough to set me deep into my blankets, that the stars above Marco’s camel twinkled too much. And I remembered that heat haze I had seen in the Iberico Hills, with just the eye ringed by the burn that Gog left me by way of a thank you. The haze I saw with a second sight. The haze that warned of secret fires.