King of Thorns

  “Find it,” I said.

  I didn’t have to explain myself. We wore the same skin.

  Row walked into the pool and let it take him. I crouched to watch.

  Row had sunk from view before I felt the steel at my neck. I looked around, up along the blade.

  “Don’t ever do that to me,” Makin said. “Swear it.”

  “I so swear,” I said.

  I needed no convincing.

  34

  Four years earlier

  It seemed that we had been running in the marshes for most of our lives. Mud spattered each of us to the tops of our heads. The Brothers showed white skin only where they had scraped the filth from around their eyes. Now as the sun lowered red toward the western horizon it gave them a wild look. Soon, when the sun drowned in the marsh and left us in darkness, we would drown too.

  “More of the bastards,” Rike shouted. Once again he was the only one who could see over the reed-sea.

  “How many?” I asked.

  “All of them,” he said. “It’s like all the reeds are falling.”

  I could hear the snarls, faint but clear on the evening air. I patted the box at my hip. It took Row two hours to find, two hours before his hand finally broke the surface to give it to me. The Brothers had not liked waiting, but two more hours would not have got us out of Chella’s muddy hell. We left him in the pool. I told Makin I had set him free. But I didn’t.

  “Can you see any clear ground?” I asked.

  Rike didn’t answer but he set off with purpose so we followed.

  The snarling grew louder, closer behind us. We ran hard, the splashing of quick dead feet closer by the second, and the shredding of reeds as they tore their path.

  One moment I ran through a rushing green blindness and the next I broke clear onto a low mound. It felt like a hill though it rose no higher than three feet above the water level.

  “Good work,” I told Rike, then gasped in breath. It’s better to die in the open.

  Chella’s army converged on us from all sides. The quick ones, mottled and mire-stained, undying rage on their faces and an unholy light in their eyes, dozens of them, flowing out to surround the mound. Behind them, minutes later, shambling in through the flattened reeds, came the grey and rotting dead, and amongst them the bog-dead from the depths, cured to the toughness of old leather and of a similar colour. I saw Price’s tall bones and tattered flesh overtopping all others. Chella walked at his side wearing a white dress, all lace and trains such as might be worn at a royal wedding. Hardly a touch of mud on it.

  “Hello, Jorg,” she said. She stood too far away for me to hear but every dead mouth whispered her words.

  “Go to hell, bitch.” I would rather have said something clever.

  “No harsh words on our wedding day, Jorg,” she said, and the dead echoed her. “The Dead King is risen. The black ships sail. You’ll join with me. Love me. And together we will open the Gilden Gate for our master and set a new emperor on the throne.”

  The dead of Gelleth came then, wandering through the marsh as if lost, ambling one way and the next. Ghosts these, but looking real enough, with their burns and their sores, teeth missing, hair and skin falling away. Hundreds of them, thousands, in a great ring of accusation. They pressed so hard that at the back some of the bog-dead were pushed aside and trampled under.

  “So,” said Rike. “Marry the bitch.”

  “She’s going to kill you all either way, Rike. She’ll have your corpse walking beside her. Price on one side, you on the other, the brothers back together again.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Fuck that then.”

  “Come now, Jorg, don’t be a baby,” Chella said, and the dead spoke with her. She spoke again, echoed this time by just one voice, from a corpse woman close by the edge of our mound. A muddy corpse, one arm chewed to the bone, her skin stained, lips grey and rotting, but something of Ruth’s lines in her face. “The Dead King is coming. The dead rise like a tide. They outnumber the living, and each battle makes more corpses, not more men.” The dead woman’s tongue writhed, black and glistening, Chella’s words slipping from it. “Join with me, Jorg. There’s a place for you in this. There’s power to be taken and held.”

  “There’s more to this,” I said. Even the high esteem in which I held my own charms didn’t allow me to believe her so smitten as to cross nations for this. And if vengeance drove her then she could take it easily enough now without this charade. “The Dead King scares you.” She sounded too eager, desperate even. “What does he want with me?”

  Even with so many yards between us I could read her. She didn’t know.

  I made to step forward but something caught my foot. Looking down I saw teeth, a dog’s skull half-buried, half-emerged, gripping my foot. Another ghost, but it pinned me even so.

  I looked out across the dead horde, scanning the packed crowds of ghosts behind them. Chella couldn’t know about my dog, Justice. She couldn’t have gathered all the dead of Gelleth or learned their stories. Somehow this came from me. Somehow Chella was pulling the ghosts of my past out through whatever hole it was I made in the world. And not even the ghosts I knew of but the ghosts of those whose end I caused. I felt the corner of an idea, not the whole shape of it, but a corner.

  The skull brought my gaze back to the ground at my feet. “You shouldn’t have done that,” I said. I tore free. I felt him rip me but Justice’s teeth left no marks upon my boot. It was just pain, no blood. It was just my mind that trapped me. The ghosts couldn’t harm us or we would have died in Ruth’s house, we would have burned with them when the Builders’ Sun lit. Chella brought them only to torment me.

  “Let’s get married, dear-heart,” Chella said. “The congregation is assembled. I’m sure we can find a cleric to perform the ceremony.”

  And pushing from the other ghosts came Friar Glen, a shade wavering in the daylight, less clear than the other spirits, as if something tried to keep him back. At my hip the box of memories grew heavy. I hadn’t known Friar Glen to be dead, but perhaps I knew it once and chose to forget. He came with a slow step, hobbling, though I could see no wound upon him, and he didn’t look well pleased. In one hand he held a knife, a familiar knife, red with blood. When a dead man shambled into his path the friar stabbed him in the neck. The creature toppled with the knife still in him. Ghosts couldn’t hurt the living, but apparently they could hurt the dead plenty. Friar Glen hobbled on until he stood at Chella’s side.

  I wondered how the friar’s ghost came to be here, watching me with such hatred. I could feel it from fifty yards. But more than that—more than I wondered about Friar Glen—I circled around the words Chella spoke before she called him.

  The congregation is assembled.

  The quick-dead moved closer though I heard no instruction. They took slow steps, their hands ready to grab and twist and tear. Against so many we would last moments.

  “It’s no kind of wedding if my family can’t attend.” I sheathed my sword.

  “Some ghosts I can’t summon. The royal dead are buried in consecrated tombs and lie with old magics. If I could have made your mother dance for you I would have done so long ago,” Chella said. The whisper reached me through the crowd, writhing on the lips of the quick-dead as they stepped ever closer.

  The congregation is assembled, but some ghosts she can’t summon.

  The remaining horses nickered behind me, nervous, even the grey.

  “I was thinking of my Brothers,” I said. I opened a hand to the left and right to indicate Makin, Kent, Grumlow, and Rike.

  “They can attend,” Chella said. “I will leave them their eyes.”

  “Will we have no music? No poets to declaim? No flowers?” I asked. I was stalling.

  “You’re stalling,” she said.

  The congregation is assembled. Aside from those she can’t summon. And those she does not wish to.

  “There’s a poet I’m thinking of, Chella. A poem. A fitting one. ‘To his coy mistress.’” br />
  “Am I coy?” She walked closer now, swaying through the dead.

  The wisdom of poets has outlived that of the Builders.

  “The poem is about time, at least in part. About how the poet can’t stop time. And in the end he says, ‘For Thus, though we cannot make our sun; Stand still, yet we will make him run.’”

  Ghosts can’t hurt men. They can drive them mad. They can torment them to the point at which they take their own lives, but they cannot wound them. I felt this to be true. My stolen necromancy told me it was so. But they can hurt the dead, it seems. I had seen it with my own eyes. The corpses that Chella set to walking could be felled by spirits because they stood closer to their world, close enough to the gates of death for a ghost to reach out and throttle them.

  “Very sweet,” Chella said. “But it won’t stop me.”

  “So I’ll make you run.” And with every fragment of my will I summoned my ghosts. I pulled them through the gates that Chella had opened. With arms spread wide I returned each shade and phantom, each haunt and spirit that had trailed me these long years. I bled them through my chest, let them pulse through me with each beat of my heart. I couldn’t stop Chella drawing forth those she wanted but I could make damn sure they all came, each and every one. At a run.

  And they came. The congregation Chella had chosen not to invite. The burning dead of Gelleth, those that the Builders’ Sun took first, not victims from the outskirts of the explosion like Ruth and her Ma, but those who burned in the Castle Red at the heart of the inferno. They poured from me in an endless torrent. Ten of them to every child of Gelleth that Chella had brought forth. And my dead, the burning dead, brought with them a fire like no other. They burned as candles in the hearth, flesh running, flames leaping, each man or woman screaming and racing or staggering and clutching. And behind them, with measured pace, a new kind of ghost, each glowing with a terrible light that made their flesh a pink haze and shadows of their bones.

  I saw nothing but fire without heat, heard only screams, and after forever we stood alone on our mound with no sign of Chella or her army save for blackened bones smouldering on damp reeds.

  “Wedding’s off,” I said, and taking my bearing from the sunset I led the Brothers away to the south.

  Brother Makin has high ideals. If he kept to them, we would be enemies. If he nursed his failure, we would not be friends.

  35

  Wedding day

  “A spade?” Hobbs said.

  If there was ever a man to call a spade a spade, Watch-master Hobbs was that man. I was just impressed a man of his age had any breath left at this point, for stating the obvious or otherwise.

  I kicked about in the snow. Spades lay everywhere, covered by a recent fall.

  “Get Stodd and Keppen’s squads shooting down the slope. Harold’s men I want using these spades to dig,” I said.

  “Stodd’s dead.” Hobbs spat and watched the snowfield. The gap between the Watch and our pursuit had vanished. Here and there men stopped running. Few managed to draw a blade, let alone swing, before they were cut down.

  Blood on snow is very pretty. In the deep powder it melts its way down and there’s not much to see, but where the snow has an icy crust, that dazzling white shines through the scarlet and makes the blood look somehow richer and more vital than ever it did in your veins.

  “Get men shooting down the slope. I don’t much care what they hit. Legs are good. Put more bodies in the way. Slow them down.”

  An injured man is more of an obstacle than a dead one. Put a big wound in a man and he often gets clingy, as though he thinks you can save him and all he has to do is hold on so you won’t leave. The fresh-wounded like company. Give them a while and they’d rather be alone with their pain. For a moment I saw Coddin, odd chinks of light offering the lines of him, curled in his tomb. Some folk bury their dead like that, curled up, forehead to knee. Makin said it makes for easier digging of a grave, but to my eye it’s more of a return. We lay coiled in the womb.

  “Shoot the bastards down!” I yelled. I waved my hands toward the men that I wanted using their bows. “Don’t pick targets.”

  Makin staggered up and I slapped a spade across his chest. Captain Harold and I started to collar other men and set them digging. None of them asked why. Except for Makin, and truthfully I think he just wanted the chance to rest.

  “We came here once,” he said.

  “Yes.” I threw another load of snow behind me. It felt odd having climbed for what seemed like forever, to now be desperately digging back down with the last of my strength.

  “We were on our way to some village…Cutting?”

  “Gutting,” I said. Another load of snow. The cries and clash of blades on the slopes closer now.

  “This is insane!” Makin dropped his spade and drew his sword. “I remember now. There are caves here. But they don’t lead anywhere. We searched them. The men we have here—they’d barely fit in.”

  My spade bit into nothing and slipped from numb fingers into the void below. “I’m through! Dig here!”

  The melee reached to within fifty yards of our position, a bloody, rolling fight, men slipping in the snow, a pink mush now, screaming, severed limbs, dripping blades. And beyond the carnage, like an arrowhead pointing directly at me, more and more and more soldiers, the line of them broadening to a mass several hundred men wide as they crossed the snowline far below.

  “I may have left it too late,” I said. I knew I’d left it too late. I spent too long with Coddin. And Arrow’s men had been faster than I thought they would be.

  “Too late?” Makin shouted. He waved his sword at the army converging on us. “We’re dead. We could have done this back down there! At least I would have had the strength to fight then.”

  He looked strong enough to me. Anger always opens a new reserve, a little something you’d forgotten about.

  “Keep digging!” I shouted at the men around me. The entrance to the caves stood wide enough for three men. A black hole in the snow.

  “How many men died in avalanches in the Matteracks last year, Makin?” I asked.

  “I don’t know!” He looked at me as if I’d asked to have his babies. “None?”

  “Three,” I said. “One the year before that.”

  Some of the enemy were trying to flank us, spreading out around the melee to come at us from the side. I unslung my bow and loosed an arrow at the men on the left.

  “We’re done,” Hobbs laboured across the slope, avoiding the diggers. To his credit he managed to add, “Sire.”

  My arrow had hit a man just above the knee. Looked like an old fellow. Some old people just don’t know when to quit. He pitched forward and fell, rolling down the mountainside. I wondered if he’d stop before he reached the Haunt. “There’s a reason we lost four men in two years to avalanches,” I said.

  “Carelessness?” Makin asked. One of the Prince’s more enterprising men had found his way uninjured around the edge of the battle below us. Makin made a quick parry then cut him down. A second soldier on the heels of the first took an arrow through his Adam’s apple.

  The clash of metal on rock. The diggers had found the cave’s edges. The hole stood wide enough for a wagon to pass but it wouldn’t be getting any wider.

  When the world is covered in snow it turns flat. All the hollows, all the bumps, are written into one unbroken surface like the white page ready for the quill. You may place on a snowfield whatever your imagination will produce, for your eyes will tell you nothing.

  “Well?” Makin asked. The men of Arrow were pushing ever closer. He seemed in want of distraction and irritated that I’d drifted off into a daydream.

  “You have to see the shades,” I said.

  “Shades?”

  I shrugged. I had time to waste: the cave was no use to us yet. “I thought that the power of being young was to see only black and white,” I said. I looked on as a man I knew among the Watch fell with the red point of a sword jutting from his back,
hands locked on the neck of the blade’s owner.

  “Shades?” Makin asked again.

  “We never look up, Makin, we never raise our heads and look up. We live in such a vast world. We crawl across its surface and concern ourselves only with what lies before us.”

  “Shades?” Makin kept stubbornly to his purpose. His thick-lipped mouth knew a thousand smiles. Smiles for winning hearts. Smiles for making friends. Smiles for tearing a laugh from the unwilling. Now he used his stubborn smile.

  I shook my arms, willing life back into them. The line buckled here and there: soon enough there’d be call for my sword. “Shades,” I told him. When all you have to look at is white, given time you will see a symphony in shades of pale. The peasants in Gutting told me this—though in their own words. There are many types of snow, many shades, and even in one shade, many flavours. There are layers. There is granularity, powder. There is power and there is danger. “When I stabbed Brother Gemt I pre-empted something,” I said. “You understand, ‘pre-empt,’ Brother Makin?”

  A thousand smiles; and one frown. He gave me the frown.

  “I killed him for the hell of it, but also because it would only be a matter of time before he came against me. Before he tried to slit my throat in the night. And not just for the cutting of his hand.”

  “What does bloody Gemt have to do with—” He cut down another man who slipped the line and I loosed an arrow at the men flanking our right side.

  “There were four deaths in two years rather than forty because the Highlanders pre-empt avalanches,” I said. “They set them off.”

  “What?”

  “They watch the snow. They see the shades. They see the ups and downs, not the flat page. They dig and test. And then they pre-empt.” I waved my bow overhead, purple ribbon cracking in the wind. “In the caves. Now!”

  When a slope looks dangerous the Highlanders take themselves above it by ridge and pass and cliff. They take with them straw, stones, a crude bowl of fired clay, kindling, charcoal—often from the burners in Ancrath’s woods—a glazed pot and a sheep’s bladder. They dig themselves a hole at the very top of the most treacherous layers, setting the bowl on top of several inches of packed straw. In the bowl they put kindling and charcoal, and set stones so that the pot will be held above the bowl. They fill the pot with snow and inflate the bladder, blowing into it as hard as they can and tying it off with a strip of gut-hide. They light the kindling and leave.