King of Thorns

  “Do what?” Gog asked, his voice high, his eyes on the Duke and the glitter of the axes held around him.

  “Put the fire out,” I said. I glanced at the hearth. “Move the fire.” I corrected myself.

  Gog didn’t look away from the Alaric in his high chair. “There’s only one fire, silly,” he said, forgetting any business of kings and dukes. “I just squeezed it.”

  I frowned. I had the edge of understanding him, but it kept slipping my grasp. I hate that. “Tell me.” I steered him by the shoulders until our eyes met.

  “There’s only one fire,” he said. His eyes were dark, their usual all-black, but his gaze held something hot, something uncomfortable, as if it might light you up like a tallow wick.

  “One fire,” I said. “And all these…” I waved a hand at the lamps. “Windows onto it?”

  “Yes.” Gog sighed, exasperated, and struggled to turn away for some new game.

  I had the image of a rug in my head. A rug with a wrinkle in it. I remembered it from softer days. From days when I slept in a world that never shook or burned, in a room where my mother would always come to say good night. A rug with a wrinkle in it and a maid trying to smooth it down with her foot. And every time she squashed it flat a new wrinkle would spring up close by. But never two. Because there was only one fold in the rug.

  “You can take fire from one place and put it in another,” I said.

  Gog nodded.

  “Because there is only one fire, and we see pieces of it,” I said. “You squeeze one corner down and pull up another.”

  Gog nodded and struggled to be off.

  “And that’s all you ever do,” I said.

  Gog didn’t answer, as if it were too obvious for comment. I let him go and he ran beneath the nearest table to play with a red-furred hound.

  “The trolls?” Alaric said, with the air of a man forcing patience.

  “We met some. Gorgoth can talk to them. They seem to like him,” I said.

  Alaric waited. It’s a good enough trick. Say nothing and men feel compelled to fill the silence, even if it’s with things they would rather have kept secret. It’s a good enough trick, but I know it and I said nothing.

  “The Duke of Maladon knows about the trolls,” Gorgoth said. The Danes flinched when he spoke, as if they thought him incapable of it and expected him to growl and snarl. “The trolls serve Ferrakind. The duke wishes to know why the ones we discovered were not in the fire-mage’s service.”

  Alaric shrugged. “It’s true.”

  “The trolls serve Ferrakind out of fear,” Gorgoth said. “Their flesh burns as easily as man-flesh. A few hide from him.”

  “Why don’t they just leave the Heimrift if they want to live free?” I asked.

  “Men,” he said.

  For a moment I didn’t understand. It’s hard to think of such creatures as victims. I remembered their black-clawed hands, hands that could snatch the head off a man.

  “They were once many,” Gorgoth said.

  “You told me they were made for war, soldiers, so why hide?” I asked.

  Gorgoth nodded. “Made for war. Made to serve. Not made to be hunted. Not to be scattered and hunted alone across strange lands.”

  I pulled myself to my full height, topping six foot of late. “I think—”

  “What do you think, Makin?” The Duke cut across me.

  Makin caught my eye and offered the tiniest of grins. “I think all these things are the glimpses of the same fire,” he said. “Everything here comes back to Ferrakind. The dead trees, the lung-flake in your cattle, your lost harvests, the knocking down of your halls one brick, one gable, one rafter at a time, the trolls, the chances of either of you ever making a play for the empire throne, all of it, with Ferrakind burning at the centre.”

  It’s always a different thing that makes the magic happen. Today it was his cleverness. But at the end of it all, you wanted Makin to be your friend.

  21

  Four years earlier

  The Danes are settled Vikings in the main. The blood of reavers mixed with that of the farmers they conquered. Every Dane counts his ancestry back to the north, to some bloody-handed warrior jumping from his longship, but in truth the wild men of the fjords scorn the Danes and call them fit-firar—a mistake that has seen a lot of Vikings on the wrong end of an axe.

  “You’re more use to me here, Makin.”

  “You’re mad to go in the first place,” Makin said.

  “It’s why we came,” I said.

  “Every new thing I hear about this Ferrakind is a new good reason not to go anywhere near him,” Makin said.

  “We’re here because he’s gone soft on the little monster,” Row said from the doorway. He hadn’t been invited to the conversation. None of them had. But on the road any raised voice is an invitation for an audience. Although strictly we weren’t on the road. We were in chambers set aside for guests in a smaller hall paralleling the Duke of Maladon’s great hall.

  “Or hard on him.” Rike leaned in under the door lintel, a nasty leer on him. Since I took the copper box he seemed to feel he had license to speak his mind.

  I turned to the doorway. “Two things you should remember, my brothers.”

  Grumlow, Sim, and Kent appeared as faces poking out behind Rike.

  “First, if you answer me back on this I swear by every priest in hell that you will not leave this building alive. Second, you may recall a time when you and our late lamented brothers were busy dying outside the Haunt. And whilst the Count of Renar’s foot-soldiers were killing you. Killing Elban, and Liar, and Fat Burlow…Gog had the whole of the count’s personal guard, more than seventy picked men, either as burning pools of human fat, or too damn scared to move. And he was seven. So right now the kind of man he grows into, and whether he grows up at all, is a question of far greater interest to me than whether you sorry lot live to see tomorrow. In fact there are a lot of questions more important to me than whether you get a day older or not, Rike, but that one is top of the list.”

  “You still need me there,” Makin said. Too many years guarding me had turned a duty into a habit, an imperative.

  “If things go well I won’t need you,” I said. “And if they go badly, I don’t think an extra sword or two will help. He has a small army of trolls at his beck and call, and he can set men on fire by thinking about it. I don’t believe a sword will help.”

  I left Makin still arguing and the others slinking around like whipped dogs. Well, not Red Kent. He had his new axe. Not a new one in truth but a fine one, forged in the high north and traded from the long-ships off Karlswater. Kent raised the axe to me as I left, nodded, and said nothing.

  Gorgoth and Gog waited for me at the Duke’s storerooms, a sack of provisions between them and waxed blankets in case we needed shelter on the slopes.

  We set off for the Heimrift with a fine spring morning breaking out all around us. We all walked. I’d grown used to Brath and had no desire to leave him untended on the side of a volcano. For all I knew trolls were partial to horsemeat. I quite like it myself.

  Sindri caught us half a mile down the road, his plaits bouncing off his back as he cantered along.

  “Not this time, Sindri, just me and the pretty boys here,” I said.

  “You’ll want me until you’re clear of the forest.”

  “The forest? We had no problems before,” I said.

  “I watched you.” Sindri grinned. “If you had gone wrong I would have guided you. But you were lucky.”

  “And what should I be scared of in the forest?” I asked. “Green trolls? Goblins? Grendel himself? You Danes have more boogie-men than the rest of the empire put together.”

  “Pine men,” he said.

  “How do they burn?” I asked.

  He laughed at that, then let the smile fall from him. “There’s something in the forest that lets the blood from men and replaces it with pine sap. They don’t die, these men, but they change.” He pointed to his eyes. ??
?The whites turn green. They don’t bleed. Axes don’t bother them.”

  I pursed my lips. “You can guide us. I’m busy today. These pine men will have to come to the Highlands and get in line if they want a part of me.”

  And so we walked, with Sindri leading his horse, along the forest paths he judged safe, and we watched the trees with new suspicions.

  By noon the woods thinned and gave over to rising moorland. We marched through waist-deep bracken, thick with stands of gorse scratching as we passed, and everywhere heather, trying to trip us, clouds of pollen blazing our trail.

  Sindri didn’t have to be told to leave. “I’ll wait here,” he said, and nestled back in the bracken on a slope that caught the sun. “Good luck with Ferrakind. If you kill him you’ll have at least one friend in the north. Probably a thousand!”

  “I’m not here to kill him,” I said.

  “Probably for the best,” Sindri said.

  I frowned at that. If I’d had three brothers die in the Heimrift then I would have an account to settle with the man who ruled there. The Danes though seemed to think of Ferrakind in the same terms as the volcanoes themselves. To take issue with him would be the same as feuding against a cliff because your friend fell off it.

  I took us back to Halradra, along the paths and slopes that we first followed. As we gained height the wind picked up and took the sweat from us. The sun stayed bright and it seemed a good day. If this was to be our last one then at least it had been pretty so far. We trailed along a long valley of black ash and broken lava flows, ancient currents still visible in the frozen rock. Far above us a lone herders’ hut stood dwarfed by the vast heave of the mountains around it, built in days when grass must have found a way to grow here. Unseen in the blue heavens a cloud passed before the sun and its shadow rippled across the expanse of silent sunlit rock arrayed east to west. Gorgoth made a deep sound in his chest. I liked that about travelling with Gorgoth. He hoarded his words, so you wouldn’t know his thoughts from one moment to the next, but he never missed anything, not even those rare occasions when the myriad parts of this dirty, worn-out world of ours come into some fleeting alignment that constructs a beauty so fierce it hurts to see.

  Where Gorgoth held his silence, Gog normally provided enough chatter for two. In the most part I would let it flow over me. Children prattle. It is their nature and it is mine to let it slide. Climbing Halradra for the second time though, Gog said nothing. After so many weeks of, “Why do horses have four legs, Brother Jorg?” “What colour is green made from, Brother Jorg?” “Why is that tree taller than the other one, Brother Jorg?” you would think I’d appreciate a rest from it, but in truth it grated more when he said nothing.

  “No questions today, Gog?” I asked.

  “No.” He shot me a glance then looked away.

  “Nothing?” I asked.

  We carried on up the slope without speaking. I knew it wasn’t just fear that kept his tongue. As a child there’s a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one…each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.

  Gog didn’t want to ask his questions because he didn’t want to hear me lie.

  We came to the caves that I had failed to see before, wrinkled our noses at the troll stink, and passed on into the darkness.

  “Some light if you will, Gog,” I said.

  He opened his hand and fire blossomed as if he’d been holding it in his fist all along.

  I led the way, through the great hall of the entrance cave, along the smooth passage rising for fifty yards to the cathedral cave, almost spherical with its potholed floor and sculpted walls.

  The trolls came quickly this time, a half dozen of them insinuating themselves into the shadowed circle around Gog’s flame. Gorgoth stood ready to set his strength against any of the new ones who doubted him, but they crouched and watched us, watched Gorgoth, and made no attacks.

  “Why are we here?” Gorgoth asked at last. I had wondered if he would ever crack.

  “I’ve chosen my ground,” I said. “If you have to meet a lion then it’s better if it isn’t in his den.”

  “You didn’t look anywhere else,” Gorgoth said.

  “I found what I wanted here.”

  “And what’s that?” he asked.

  “A faint hope.” I grinned and squatted down to be level with Gog. “We have to meet him sometime, Gog. This problem of yours, these fires, they’re going to pull you down sooner or later, and there’s nothing I can do, not even Gorgoth can help you, and the next time will be worse and the next worse still.” I didn’t lie to him. He didn’t want to hear me lie.

  A tear rolled down his cheek then sputtered into steam. I took his hand, very small in mine, and pressed the stolen rune stone into his palm, closing his fingers about it. “You and I, Gog, we’re the same. Fighters. Brothers. We’ll go in there together and come out together.” And we were the same, all lying aside. Underneath it, brushing away the goodness in him, the evil in me, we had a bond. I needed to see him win through. Nothing selfless about it. If Gog could outlast what ate him from the inside out, then maybe I could too. Hell, I didn’t come halfway across the empire to save a scrawny child. I came to save me.

  “We’re going to call Ferrakind to us,” I said. I glanced at the trolls. They watched me with wet black eyes, no reaction to Ferrakind’s name. “Do they even understand what I’m saying?”

  “No,” said Gorgoth. “They’re wondering if you’d be good to eat.”

  “Ask them if there other ways out of here, ones that lead out higher up the mountain.”

  A pause. I strained to hear what passed between them and heard nothing but the flutter of Gog’s flame.

  “They can take us to one,” Gorgoth said.

  “Tell them Ferrakind is going to come. Tell them to hide close by but be ready to lead us out by one of these other paths.”

  I could tell when Gorgoth’s thoughts hit them. They were on their feet in a moment, black mouths stretched in silent snarls and roars, black tongues lashing over their jagged teeth. Quicker than they appeared they were gone, lost in the darkness.

  “Right, we’re going to call Ferrakind. I’m going to try to get him to help us.” I steered Gog’s face away from the entrance and back to mine. “If things go badly I want you to do the trick we saw in the Duke’s hall. If Ferrakind tries to burn us, I want you to take the fire and put it where I show you.”

  “I’ll try,” Gog said.

  “Try hard.” I’d been scared of burning all my life, since the poker, maybe before that even. I thought of Justice howling as he burned in chains. Sour vomit bubbled at the back of my throat. I could walk away from this. I could just walk.

  “How will we make him come here, Brother Jorg?” Gog’s first question of the day.

  The vision of me walking down the slope still filled my eyes. I would whistle in the spring sunshine and smile. Sweat trickled from beneath my arms, cool across my ribs. If Makin were here he would say he had a bad feeling about this. He’d be right too.

  I could just leave. I could just leave.

  If Coddin were here he would call this too great a risk with no certain reward. He would say that but he would mean “Get the hell out of there, Jorg,” because he wouldn’t want me to burn.

  And if my father were here. If he saw me stepping toward the sunlight. Taking the easy path. He would say in a voice so soft that you might almost miss it, “One more, Jorg. One more.” And at each crossroad thereafter I would choose the easy path one more time. And in the end what I loved would still burn.

  “Make a fire, Gog,” I said. “Make the biggest fucking fire in the world.”

  G
og looked at Gorgoth, who nodded and stepped back. For a long moment, measured by half a dozen slow-drawn breaths, nothing happened. Faint at first, as if it were imagination, the flame patterns on Gog’s back started to flicker and move. The colour deepened. Flushes of crimson ran through him and the ash grey paled. The heat reached me and I stepped back, then back again. The shadows had run from the cavern but I had no time to see what they revealed. Gog pulsed with heat like an ember in the smith’s fire pulses with each breath of the bellows. Gorgoth and I retreated into the tunnel that led up from behind the cathedral cave. We stood with the heat of Gog’s fire burning on our faces and the air rolling down from behind us icy on our necks.

  The flames came without sound and the whole of the cathedral cave filled with swirling orange fire. We staggered back, losing sight of the cavern but still blistered by the inferno. My breath came in gasps as if the fire had burned out what I needed from the air.

  “How will this help?” Gorgoth asked.

  “There’s only one fire.” I drew in a lungful of hot and useless air. Black dots swam across my vision. “And Ferrakind watches through it as if it were a window to all the world.”

  Gorgoth caught my shoulder and stopped me falling. It seemed to take no effort and I managed a small pang of resentment at that even as I began to slip into a darker place where his hand could not support me. I could hear nothing but my own gasps and the sound of my heels dragging as he pulled me farther back, farther up. Most of me felt hot enough to ignite spontaneously, but strangely my feet were freezing.

  The fire that had made no sound as it came gave a distinct whumpf as it went out. It ended before I passed out entirely, and a shock of cold brought me round with a hoarse curse.

  “What the hell?” I lay in a small stream of icy water. The tunnel had been dry before, yet now a stream ran along it, rattling pebbles in its flow. I rolled in the freezing trickle for good measure then used the wall to get myself vertical. Gorgoth led the way back. He’d spent a lifetime in the dark beneath Mount Honas and his cat’s eyes found him good footing whilst I stumbled behind. The little stream followed us back into the cathedral chamber where it bubbled and steamed on the hot rocks.