Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War) (17 page)

It’s not until you’ve actually been throttled that you realize how terrible it is. It doesn’t take enormous strength to seal your air off completely—and the dead man’s strength
was
enormous. When you’re denied a breath, then all of a sudden breathing is the
only
thing you’re interested in. I clawed at the wrist beneath my chin, dug at the fingers, but if a face can kiss Snorri’s axe and still find a smile, then fingernails aren’t going to mean much. I planted a foot on the dead thing’s shoulder and pushed for all I was worth. It felt as though my throat would be ripped from my neck, but the grip wasn’t released. Black spots began to grow in my vision, joining at the edges to make a wall of darkness. Blinding cracks ran through the black, my heart hammered behind its cage of ribs, and the stink of burning flesh filled my nostrils even though I could draw no air into them.

And then, as suddenly as the hand had seized me, it was gone. Snorri loomed over me, gripped under my armpits, and hauled me clear. If my throat hadn’t been so well lubricated with terror-sweat I suspect I would have seen it still clutched in the dead man’s fingers, red and dripping.

Snorri snatched up his axe while I sucked air through the straw that being choked had left me with. The dead man stood, still grinning amidst the butchered remains of his face, and raised his hands towards us, the wrists and forearms curiously burned, wisps of smoke still lifting from them. Snorri made to advance, but two figures tackled him from the rear. He staggered, desperate to keep his footing. Two of his victims clung to him, blood still oozing from the fatal wounds his axe had given them.

Gasping and weak, I backed away from the spearman, still on my arse, shuffling amongst the rocks, retreating before his unhurried advance. Snorri looked in trouble too, with one of the things clinging to his back, the other encircling his waist with both arms and trying to eat its way into his stomach.

“Help.” I only managed to squeak it out as a whisper. I don’t think Snorri noticed. He’d just thrown himself back against the rock wall to the next ledge, sandwiching the corpse on his back between the broadness of his shoulders and the stone.
He
might not have heard my cry for aid, but
I
heard the resulting cracking of ribs and vertebrae loud and clear.

“Mffgl.” The dead spearman tried to speak just before he fell upon me. Torn flesh and a broken jaw rendered him incomprehensible.

“Help!” I managed a touch more volume, and this time, expecting to be throttled again, I caught both the creature’s wrists. The thing’s strength was shocking, and the burned flesh slid and tore beneath my grip.

Across the way, just behind my attacker’s head, I saw Snorri butcher the corpse-man he’d crushed, not severing its head but pulverizing its neck with two quick axe blows. With the second blow a horrifying change came over my opponent. Its strength multiplied and where it had been inexorably pressing my arms back it now brushed aside any attempt at defence and sealed both hands around my bruised neck once more.

The ruined face came close to mine, dripping, tongue writhing over shattered teeth and a hideous intelligence in its eyes. Yards behind, Snorri caught the head of his last opponent in both hands and with an oath pushed it away from his side. It took all his strength, as if his enemy had also grown in power, and the scarlet mouth he tore from his hip trailed skin and strands of flesh from its jaws. Snorri drove his knee right into the thing’s face, booted it away, then pursued, raising a big rock on high to pulp its head.

Again, as if some necromantic vitality had been shared amongst the corpses and now flowed from the destroyed corpse into the last available vessel, my enemy’s strength redoubled. It stood, lifting me as if I were nothing. By rights it should have snapped my neck, but although the strength of its arms had grown, the creature’s grip actually weakened.

I looked down and where my hands fastened upon the dead skin, a blinding light burned. The white heat of a desert sun bled between my fingers, my bones just shadows in a rosy haze of pumping blood and living flesh. The dead thing crisped where I touched it. Fats bubbled, flesh burned back, exposing sinews that smouldered, then shrivelled.

I nearly let go in shock.

Snorri came running, axe recovered and ready. He whirled it in a blow towards the monstrosity’s head, but somehow it took one hand from my throat and caught the weapon beneath its blade. The haft thunked against its palm with a dull and wooden sound. Snorri struggled to pull his axe free, but though he dragged the dead man several yards, and me too, still held in its choking fingers, he couldn’t defeat the thing’s strength.

The Norseman paused, slipped his grip to the end of the axe haft and to the head, and used the weapon as a lever to twist the spearman’s wrist. Bones snapped with loud retorts, tendons gave, flesh tore. Leaving his axe in the broken hand, Snorri bore his foe to the ground and proceeded to pulp the grinning face with a large chunk of rock.

Released, I rolled clear, struggling for air. The hand that had held me now rested on two blackened arm bones jutting from the dead man’s forearm. Even now my breath wouldn’t draw. I fell into unconsciousness, reflecting rather abstractly that I’d never even known that there were two bones in a man’s forearm.

“W
ake up.”

I don’t want to.

“Wake up.” A slap this time. Perhaps there had been one the first time too.

Not if I’m still on that sodding mountain.
Someone had packed my throat with brambles and my chest hurt.

“Now!”

I opened one eye. The sky still kept an echo of the day though the sun had set. Already the cold had rolled down from the peaks. Damn. Still on the mountain. “Bugger.” The word came out in thin slivers. Snorri let my head slide back onto my pack and moved away.

“What are you doing?” Not enough of the question emerged for him to respond. I gave up and let the air wheeze back into my lungs. A charred hand rose before my face and I yelped, flinching from it before realizing it was my own. The strange disconnected feeling persisted as I edged into an upright position and started to pick pieces of blackened skin from my palm. Not my skin, but fragments from the dead thing that had tried to kill me. The pieces of skin, part crispy, part wet, fell amongst the rocks, too heavy for the wind to take. Memories of the attack were just as broken and unwelcome. Trying not to think about it didn’t help. I kept seeing the light bleeding out from beneath my hand, blinding and without heat.
How did it burn without heat?

“What are you doing?” Perhaps Snorri would distract me. My voice came louder this time, and he looked up.

“Cleaning the wound. Damn thing bit me.”

I could see teeth marks in the flesh above his hip. “The sword cut looks worse.” A red furrow sliced through the ridged topography of his abdomen.

“Bites are dirty wounds. Better to be skewered through the arm by a sword than bitten on the hand by a hound.” Snorri squeezed the damaged flesh again, producing a rush of blood that ran down over his belt. He grimaced and reached for his water flask, tipping some of our last reserves over the injury site.

“What the hell happened?” Most of me didn’t want to know, but apparently my mouth did.

“Necromancy.” Snorri took a needle and thread from his pack, something he must have acquired at the circus. Both were covered in an orange paste. Some heathen conceit to keep ill humours out of the wound, no doubt. “No unborn here,” he said. “But a powerful necromancy to return the dead so soon after death.” Another stitch placed. My stomach lurched. “And for the necromancer to not even be present!” He shook his head, then nodded to a spot behind me. “I expect our friend knows more.”

“Buggeration!” Twisting my neck to look reminded me that someone had filled it with broken glass. I edged my whole body around by degrees, keeping my head facing front and centre. Finally Meegan came into view, pale eyes goggling at me over a gag of knotted cloth. Snorri had bound him hand and foot and sat him with his back to a boulder. Saliva clung to the stubble on his chin and his arms trembled, from fear or the cold or both.

“So how are you going to make him talk?” I asked.

“Beat him about, I expect.” Snorri glanced up from his stitching. The needle looked ridiculously small in the great paws of his hands, and at the same time far larger and more pointy than anything I’d want to have to push through my own flesh.

I sniffed. The place stank of death and the wind couldn’t scour it clean. “Edris!” The memory hit me like cold water. I reached for my sword and couldn’t find it.

“Gone.” Snorri sounded a touch disappointed. “The bodies we threw down got up again and scared his lot off. I watched them go.”

“Hell! More of those things?” I’d rather face Edris than another of those grinning corpses with their refusal to play dead and their penchant for throttling me.

Snorri nodded, dipped to bite through the thread, then spat it out. “Can’t climb, though. They weren’t great at it when they were alive. Now?” He shook his head.

I had no desire to look over the edge and see their faces staring up at me, raw fingers clutching at the rocks, climbing, sliding back, climbing again. I remembered the look in those eyes as the thing choked me. Bile rose at the back of my throat. Something different had watched me from those eyes, something far worse than whatever had looked out through them for all the years prior to those last minutes.

Meegan might have scared me back in the tavern, studying me as if I were an insect he would enjoy pulling legs off, but on the mountain he proved one of the least worrying things to look at. “Beating him’s apt to knock him senseless again. And your idea of a beating would probably kill an ox.”

“We can’t kill him,” Snorri said. “Who knows what we’d get?”

“
I
know that.” I set my forehead in my hand, reminding myself just how much bigger Snorri was than me. “And now
he
does too. Which isn’t helping our cause.”

“Oh.” Snorri placed another stitch, drawing two ragged edges of his belly together. “Sorry.”

“I say we take his boots off and light a small fire under his feet. He’ll know his only chance of getting off this mountain is to be able to walk. And it won’t take long to loosen his tongue.”

“Look around.” Snorri gestured with the knife he was using to trim a bandage. “No wood. No fire.” He frowned. “That last corpse I threw over, though . . . the arms were burned. How did you do that?” Narrowed eyes focused in on my hands, still blackened.

“It wasn’t me.” It almost sounded true. It
couldn’t
have been me. “I don’t know.”

Snorri shrugged. “Calm down. I’m not one of your Roma Inquisitors. Just thought it might be useful with Goggle there.” He pointed his knife at Meegan.

I looked at my hands and wondered. It’s often said that cowards make the best torturers. Cowards have good imaginations, imaginations that torment them with all the worst stuff of nightmare, all the horrors that could befall them. This provides an excellent arsenal when it comes to inflicting misery on others. And their final qualification is that they understand the fears of their victim better than the victim does himself.

All this might be true, but I’ve always found myself too scared that somehow, some way, any victim of mine might escape, turn the tables, and work the same horrors on me. Basically the cowards who make good torturers are less cowardly than me. Even so, Meegan did need some encouragement and I needed to understand what had happened with the corpse-man. Snorri had mentioned the Roma Inquisitors, without doubt the most accomplished torturers in the Broken Empire. If I wanted to avoid discussing “my witchcraft” with those monsters, then I would be best advised to understand it myself so as to be rid of it as quickly as feasible and to be able to hide it as effectively as possible.

Meegan had an ugly-looking cut on his arm, just below the shoulder. Some edge of the rock had ripped through his padded jerkin and chewed on into his flesh. I reached out towards it. Always start with a weak point.

“Myltorc! Myltorcdammu!” He chewed at the gag trying to get the words out.

I have to admit a small thrill at having the upper hand after what seemed like weeks of nothing but running, sleeping in ditches, and being terrified. Here at last was a foe I could handle.

“Oh, you’ll talk all right!” I used the menacing voice I used to scare my younger cousins with when they were small enough to push around. “You’ll talk.” And I slapped my palm to his wound, willing him to burn!

The results were . . . underwhelming. At first I felt nothing but the decidedly unpleasant squishiness of his injury as he writhed and jerked beneath my touch. I had to press hard to keep him from twisting away. At least it seemed to be hurting him, but that turned out to be more by way of anticipation than anything else, and he quieted down soon enough. I tried harder. Who knows what working magic is supposed to feel like? In the games we used to play in the palace, the sorcerer—always Martus, by dint of being the eldest brother—cast his spells with a strained face, as if constipated, squeezing his reluctant magic into the world through a small . . . well, you get the picture. Lacking any better instruction, I put into practice what I’d learned as a child. I crouched there on the mountain, one hand on my hopefully terrified victim, my face constipated with the awesome power I was straining to release.

When it actually happened, nobody there was more surprised than me. My hand tingled. I’m sure all magic tingles—though it may have been pins and needles—then a peculiar brittle feeling stole from each fingertip, joining and spreading to the wrist. What I first took to be a paling of the flesh became a faint but unmistakable glow. Light started to leak around my fingers as if I were concealing something brighter than the sun within my grip, and a faint warmth rolled beneath my palm. Meegan stopped struggling and stared at me in horror, straining at his bonds. I pushed harder, willing hurt into the little bastard. Bright fracture lines started to spread across the back of my hand.

The light and the warmth seemed to draw on me, flow from my core to the single extremity where they burned. The day grew colder, the rocks harder, the pain in my ankle and throat sharp and insistent. The spreading cracks frightened me, too strong a reminder of the fissure that had chased me when I broke the Silent Sister’s spell.

“No!” I jerked my hand back, and the weight of exhaustion that settled on me nearly pressed me to the rocks.

A shadow loomed across us. “Have you broken him yet?” Snorri squatted beside me, wincing.

I lifted my head. It weighed several times more than it should. The rip in Meegan’s jerkin showed pale and unbroken skin beneath the blackening smears of blood, a faint scar recording where his wound had been. “Shit.”

Snorri tugged at the man’s gag. “Ready to talk?”

“I been ready since I came round,” Meegan said, trying to roll back into a sitting position. “I was trying to tell that one. No need for any rough stuff. I’ll tell you everything I know.”

“Oh,” I said, vaguely disappointed, though it was exactly what I would have done in his position. “And we’re supposed to let you go after that, are we?”

Meegan swallowed. “It’d be right fair of you.” He had a nervous, sweaty way about him.

“Fair as twenty against two?” Snorri rumbled. He’d brought his axe with him and ran his thumb along its edge as he spoke.

“Ah, well.” Meegan swallowed again. “Weren’t anything personal. That’s just how many she paid for. Was just business for Edris. He spread her coin around and got together a bunch of us local men, fellas who’d seen some trouble, fellas who’d fought a battle or hired theirselves out for sharp-work before, that kind o’ thing.”

“She?” I knew plenty of women who’d like to see me take a beating, and not a few who might pay to have it done, but twenty men was excessive, and most of them would probably not want the castigation to be fatal.

Meegan nodded, eager to please, spittle drying on his chin, snot on his upper lip. “Edris said she were a fine-looking woman. Didn’t say it all polite like that, though, no sir.”

“You didn’t see her?” Snorri leaned in.

Meegan shook his head. “Edris made the deal. He ain’t local. Knows a lot of bad folk. Passes through once, twice a year.”

“She’ll be the necromancer. Did she have a name?” Snorri asked.

“Chella.” Meegan licked his lips. “Had Edris scared, she did. Never seen him scared afore. I didn’t want to meet her, not after that. Don’t care how tasty she were built.”

“And would you know where to find this Chella now?” Snorri’s great hands closed around the haft of his axe as if imagining it the necromancer’s throat.

Meegan shook his head, a quick shake like a dog flinching off water. “Ain’t from around here. A northerner, Edris said. Had a bottle of liquor off her, he did, for us all to toast the mission with. Some Gelleth brew, I think Darab said it was. Strange burn to it.” He smacked his lips. “Passing strange. Made you want more of it, though. Most like she’s from Gelleth. Perhaps she went back. Perhaps she’s watching us right now. Something stood the boys back up after you knocked ’em down.”

“What should we do?” I didn’t like the idea of some necromancer witch watching from the ridges, ready to send her dead men after us. The whole idea had sounded faintly ridiculous back in Grandmother’s court. I’d been sure most of it was lies, and whatever parts of it might have held truth didn’t seem so scary. Mouldy old corpses jerking witlessly after frightened peasants seemed no threat to proper soldiery. But miles from civilization—and Rhonish civilization at that—outnumbered by the dead on treacherous ground, my view of things had suffered an about turn. “I mean, we should do something.”

“With him?” Snorri kicked Meegan’s bound feet.

“About her,” I said.

“My goal is in the North. If anything gets in my way, I’ll put a hole through it. If not, I’ll leave it behind.”

“We pick up the pace, keep heading north. I like it.” When a plan involves running away, I’m in.

“And him?” None of the solutions for Meegan looked good. I didn’t want to let him go, I didn’t want to keep him, but whilst I’ll do my fellow man down at every turn, I’ve no murder in me.

“Let him join his friends.” Snorri knotted a hand in the ropes around Meegan’s wrists and hoisted him to his feet.

“Hey now, that hardly seems fair. He was going to kill—”

Snorri took three strides, dragging Meegan to the edge where the rock fell away in a single steep step . . . and pushed him over. “Those friends.”

Meegan’s wail of despair ended with a wet thunk and the sound of something, or things, running towards the place he hit. Snorri met my shocked gaze. “I try to be a fair man, to live with honour, but come against me armed and looking to take my life, and you will not walk away again.”