Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3) (51 page)

‘Death isn’t what it used to be.’ Perhaps the wisest words ever to come from Red Kent’s lips. He lay dying among the dead, among the foe he had laid low, so torn there could be only minutes left to him. Makin went to his side.

‘Miana!’ As I shouted it I knew a hint of the pain I would feel were she not to answer. Fewer than half the Hundred still survived, many fewer. I saw no sign of Sindri, of my grandfather or uncle. Ibn Fayed I saw. At least I saw his head.

‘Here.’ And I found her, almost pinned to the wall behind Gorgoth’s bulk. The red trolls lay broken in the carnage. Gorgoth unfolded, dripping and ripped. In one hand he held my son against his chest.

Something struck through me, seeing my child, there in that moment. Something sharper than edges. A certainty. The knowing that my father had failed to mould me in his image. I loved that baby, small and bloodied and ugly as he was. The denial had run from me. And with that knowing came another: the certainty that I could only ever hurt him. That the taint of my father would drip from my fingers unbidden and make another monster of my son.

I staggered back and fell into my throne. An autumn leaf swirled around my feet, brought in with the dead. A single maple leaf, scarlet with the season’s sin. A sign. In that moment I knew myself too full of poison to do anything but drop. The fall had come for me. With numb fingers I undid the straps on my breastplate.

‘Still …’ Marten shook his head and crouched beside Kai. ‘A child. A boy. What was he? Ten?’

‘Seven.’

‘A boy of seven. Lost in the deadlands. Fought his way out? Became king?’ With each question he shook his head. I could see the possibilities bubbling inside him.

You can save him.
Luntar’s words. A man who saw the future.

‘I’ll bet he gave them hell.’ A grim smile tugged at me. I wondered if that same angel, the one that came to me past death’s doorstep, had visited little William. I wondered what short shrift he gave her. ‘I’ll bet he took the hardest path.’ Like the Conaught spear, William would have hauled himself deeper, aimed for the heart of darkness, found the lichkin. The rest lay beyond my imagining.

Kai sprawled, shattered and empty, William gone, the dead fallen, only Chella standing amid the gleam of their armour. My enemies defeated, and yet the sorrow remained, keener, more true, more clean, for I had always owned it. It echoed back to the thorns, the tone of a bell resounding through the years. We’re fashioned by our sorrows – not by joy – they are the undercurrent, the refrain. Joy is fleeting.

‘I let the thorns hold me, and a crack has run through all my days, deeper than the feelings it divides.’ The calligraphy of those scars lay writ across me still, white upon my flesh. ‘To everything there is a season.’ I spoke Ecclesiasticus. ‘A time to be born. A time to die.’

‘He will return: you can’t destroy him.’ Chella from the heaped corpses, her former troops. She sounded neither happy nor sad. More lost.

‘I don’t want to destroy him,’ I said. ‘He’s my brother. It was given to me to save him.’ I knew what to do. I had always known. I set a hand to the throne. ‘I hadn’t known how bitter-sweet this would taste.’ Across the hall my son cried in his mother’s arms, both of them beautiful. My brother would always return and my boy would never be safe, for our pain had become a wheel and the world lay broken. My brother, my son, my fault.

A tear made its slow passage across my cheek.

I stood somehow, though the strength had gone from me. And joined Makin, standing above him as he knelt with Kent. Marten at my shoulder. Rike came across, bloodied but whole, a gold chain decorated in diamonds and gore hanging from one fist, almost an afterthought.

‘I don’t want to destroy him,’ I said. ‘I want to save him. I should have saved him back when the thorns held me. Nothing has been right since then.’ Fear shook me, sudden, fierce, fear of what I had to do, fear that I hadn’t the courage.

‘No.’ Marten behind me. Marten would always be the first to understand. Marten who failed his son, who let his boy die. There are no rights and wrongs in such matters. Only wrongs. ‘Don’t.’ The word choked him.

‘Death isn’t—’ And Red Kent died amid the circle of his brothers who did love him each in our way. ‘Isn’t what it was,’ I finished for him.

Chella stepped closer. No one moved to stop her. ‘He’s gone where you can’t follow, Jorg.’

‘You can’t.’ Marten’s voice thick with knowing.

‘Even now they tell me “can’t”, Makin,’ I said, half in sadness, half in the joy of ending. The bitter and the sweet. ‘They tell me “no” and think there must be something I won’t sacrifice to get what I want.’ What I need.

Makin looked up at that, confused but understanding we none of us were speaking of Kent. He struggled to rise and that’s when I hit him. A man like Makin you have to catch off-balance. I struck him hard enough to break my hand, and did. He fell boneless, one arm flopping out almost to Chella’s feet.

‘What?’ Rike took his gaze from Brother Kent, amazed.

‘He would have tried to stop me. Tell him he’s to be steward. An order, not a choice.’ I cradled my hand, let the pain sharpen away sorrow. ‘He would have tried to stop me. Even with his little girl gone all these years, he wouldn’t understand. Not Makin.’

‘Fuck Makin.
I
don’t understand.’ Rike bristled, the sword in his fist still dripping.

Movement at the Gilden Arch. Katherine, a sword clutched across her, unsteady.

‘Rike, glorious Rike! I knew I kept you around for a reason, Brother.’ I pulled the breastplate from me and opened my arms. ‘Do it.’

‘What?’ He stared as though I were mad.

‘I need to follow him, Rike. I need to find my brother.’

‘I—’

‘Kill me. You’ve threatened it often enough. Now I’m asking.’

Rike just stared, eyes wide and bright. Behind him Katherine had started to run toward us, shouting, begging me to stop or urging me on – I couldn’t tell.

‘I’m your fecking emperor. I command you.’

‘I—’ And the big idiot looked at his sword as if it were a foreign thing. ‘No.’ And dropped it.

And that’s when Chella stabbed me. My brother’s knife, taken from his corpse, stuck near enough into the wound that father gave me. She went one better though, and twisted the blade. Our final kiss.

‘Go to hell, Jorg Ancrath.’ The last words I ever heard.

On the road my brothers spoke of death many a time. The stranger who walked with us. But more than they talked of death they talked of dying, and often the business of avoiding it. Brother Burlow would speak of the light. The light that came to a man lying in his blood, when more of it lay out than in.

‘I’ve heard men say it starts so faint, like a dawn, Brothers. And you look and you find yourself in the tunnel that’s your life, that you’ve walked in darkness all your years.’

Burlow was a reader, you understand. It doesn’t pay to trust a lettered man on the road, Brothers, their heads are full of other men’s ideas.

‘But don’t look into that light,’ he said. ‘For sweet as it might be, there’s no coming back from there, and it will draw you in, yes it will. I’ve sat by too many men, laid broken on the verge, and heard them whisper about that light through dry lips. They none of them walked the road again.’

At least that’s how Fat Burlow had it. And maybe his light was sweet, Brothers. But I’ve looked into that light and it comes at first as a cold star in the dark of night. Closer and more close it draws, or you are drawn – these things are equal in a place without time – and you come to know it for what it is. A white hunger, Brothers, the incinerating incandescence of the furnace mouth, ready to consume you utterly.

That light took me in and it spat me out, far from the world.

I thought I knew death. I thought it dry. But the death I fell into was an ocean, cold and infinite and the colour of forever. And I hung there, without time, or up, or down. Waiting, always waiting, for an angel.

This death fell wet upon me.

I spat the water from a dry mouth. A cry escaped me and the pain came again, too deep to be endured. Lightning flashed and the thorns and coils of the briar made sharp black shapes against the sky. The rain lashed cold, and I hung in its embrace, unable to fall.

‘The thorns.’ My senses had left me for a moment.

A second crack of lightning, across the rolling thunder of the previous stroke. The carriage lay beside the road, figures moving all about it.

‘I’m in the thorns.’

‘You never left them, Jorg,’ she said.

She stood beside me, my angel, she of warmth and light and possibilities.

‘I don’t understand.’ The pain still lanced me, my flesh tenting crimson around a hundred barbs, but with her beside me it was only pain.

‘You understand.’ Her voice nothing but love.

‘My life was a dream?’

‘All lives are dreams, Jorg.’

‘Was— was none of it real? I’ve been hanging in the thorns all my life?’

‘All dreams are real, Jorg. Even this one.’

‘What—’ My arm twitched and red agony flooded me. I found my breath again. ‘What do you want of me?’

‘I want to save you,’ she said. ‘Come.’ And she offered me her hand. A hand in which colour moved like the faintly-shadowed skin on molten silver. To take that hand would end all pain. She offered me salvation. Maybe that was all salvation had ever been. An open hand waiting to be taken.

‘I bet my brother told you to go to hell,’ I said.

Lightning struck once more and there was no angel, just a Renar soldier carrying William by the ankles like a hunter’s kill. Carrying him toward that milestone, carrying him to dash his head open.

Nature shaped the claw to trap, and the tooth to kill, but the thorn … the thorn’s only purpose is to hurt. The thorns of the hook-briar are like to find the bone. They do not come out easy. If you make a stone of your mind, if you thrash and tear, if you break and pull and bite, if you do these things you will leave the briar for it cannot hold a man who does not wish to be held. You will escape. Not all of you, but enough to crawl. And crawling, I left the briar. And reached my brother.

We died together. As we always should have.

A cold stone hall. Echoing. The ceiling black with smoke. Whimpers of pain. Not human pain, but familiar nonetheless.

‘One more,’ Father said. ‘He has a leg left to stand on, does he not, Sir Reilly?’

And for once Sir Reilly would not answer his king.

‘One more, Jorg.’

I looked at Justice, broken and licking the tears and snot from my hand. ‘No.’

And with that Father took the torch and tossed it into the cart.

I rolled back from the sudden bloom of flame. Whatever my heart told me to do, my body remembered the lesson of the poker and would not let me stay. The howling from the cart made all that had gone before seem as nothing. I call it howling but it was screaming. Man, dog, horse. With enough hurt we all sound the same.

I looked into the flame and found it that same incinerating incandescence which had waited for me at the end of my tunnel, blind, white hunger, blind, white pain. Flesh knows what it wants and will refuse the fire whatever you have to say about the matter.

But sometimes flesh must be told.

‘I.’

I couldn’t do it, Brothers.

‘Can’t.’

Have you ever dared a jump, perhaps from some untold height into clear waters and found that at the very edge you simply cannot? Have you hung from four fingers above an empty span of yards, hung by three fingers and by two, and known in that moment that you can’t drop? While any grip remains, your flesh will save itself in the face of all odds.

The heat of that fire. The fierceness of the blaze. And Justice twisting in its heart, screaming. I couldn’t do it.

I could not.

And then I could. I leapt. I let myself drop. I held my dog. I burned.

A dark sky, a tugging wind. It could be anywhere or any when, and yet I knew I had never been here.

‘You found me, then?’

William, seven years to him, golden curls, soft child’s flesh, Justice curled at his feet. The old hound lifted his head at the scent of me, his tail beating once, twice against the ground. ‘Down, boy.’ William set his hand between those long ears.

‘I found you.’ We shared a smile.

‘I can’t get in.’ He waved at the golden gates towering behind us.

I walked across and set a hand to them. The warmth filled me with promises. I pulled away.

‘Heaven is over-rated, Will.’

He shrugged and patted our dog.

‘Besides,’ I said. ‘It’s not real. It’s a thing we’ve made. A thing that men have built without knowing it, a place made out of expectation and hope.’

‘It’s not real?’ He blinked at that.

‘No. Nor the angel. Not a lie, but not real either. A dream dreamt by good men, if you like.’

‘So what is death, really?’ he asked. ‘I think I have a right to know. I’ve been dead for years. And here you are, five minutes in, knowing it all. What is real if it’s not this?’

I had to grin at that. The older brother all over.

‘I don’t know what real really is,’ I said. ‘But it’s deeper than this.’ I waved at the golden gates. ‘Fundamental. Pure. And it’s what we need. And if there’s a heaven it’s better than this and requires no gates. Shall we find out?’

‘Why?’ Will lay back, still scratching between Justice’s ears.

‘Did you see your nephew?’ I asked.

Will nodded, hiding a shy smile.

‘If we don’t do this, he’s going to burn. Him and everyone else. And it will get pretty crowded around here. So help me find it.’ No half-measures. No compromise. Save them all, or none.

‘Find what?’

‘A wheel. That’s how Fexler thought of it. And expectations seem to matter here.’

‘Oh, that?’ Will hid a yawn and pointed.

The wheel stood on a hilltop, black against a mauve sky, horizontal on a raised shaft that sunk down into the stone. We walked across to it. The sky lightening above us, fractures spreading across it through which a whiter light bled.

From the hilltop we could look down over the dry lands, sloping away into darkness.