Prince of Thorns (The Broken Empire 1)

I didn’t have to hunt. “Yes.”

Gorgoth hadn’t stirred while I fought Rike. He sat on the cold stone, legs crossed under him. Here and there the ghost-flesh of skeletal fingers had marked his hide with dead spots, little white fingerprints where the flesh had died. He didn’t move, but he watched me with those cat’s eyes of his.

A yard or two from Gorgoth I could make out a small dark huddle, Gog and Magog clutched one to another.

“A fine fight, lad,” I called to Gog. “You were as good as your word.”

Gog lifted his face to me. Magog’s head flopped back, rolling on a neck scored by white lines, dead white lines across his tiger stripes.

I found myself kneeling beside them. Gog snarled when I touched his brother, but he didn’t stop me. Magog felt so light in my hands, a curious mix of bony starvation and child softness.

“Your brother,” I said. For the longest moment I had nothing else to say, as though my throat closed away all my words. “So little.” I remembered him scampering up those endless stairs. In the end I had to press on my broken ribs to let the pain sharpen me and chase out the stupidity.

I set the dead child down, and stood. “You fought for him, Gog. Stupid, but maybe you’ll find comfort in it.” Maybe his reproach won’t follow you the length of your days.

“We have a new mascot!” I announced to the brothers. “Gog here is now part of our merry band.”

Gorgoth started up at that. “The necromancers—”

I stepped in before he rose to his feet, the iron face of the Nuban’s crossbow three inches from his ridged forehead. “What’s it going to be, Gorgoth?” I asked. He sat himself back down.

I turned away. “We burn the dead. I’m not having them come back to say hello.”

“Burn ’em with what?” Red Kent wanted to know.

“Bones is poor kindling, Jorth.” Elban hawked a wad of phlegm into the nearest pile as if to prove his point.

“We’ll have us a bone-fire even so,” I said. “I saw a tar drip on my way back.”

So we took the bones to where the black stuff leaked slow and stinking from a crack in the Builder-stone and daubed them one by one. We made a heap for Roddat and the others, and a little pyre for the leucrota. Elban built it like the ones they fashion for kings in the Teuton lands.

I set the fire with Makin’s torch. “Goodnight, lads,” I said. “Thieves and road-scum the lot of you. Tell the Devil I said to take good care of you.”

I gave the torch to Gog. “Light it up, you don’t want the necromancers playing with his bones.” A heat came off the boy, as if a fire banked inside him had woken. Any hotter and he might light the pyre without the torch.

He set the flame and we backed off before the billowing smoke. Tar never burns clean, but I wasn’t sorry for the veil it gave us. Gog gave me the torch back. The inky pools of his eyes held their secrets even tighter than the Nuban’s did, but I could see something in there. A kind of pride.

We made our way on. I let Burlow carry the Nuban’s bow. A prince must exercise some privilege after all. We walked with our tar-bone torches smoking, and Gorgoth at the fore to find the path.

He showed us mile after mile of dull box-chamber, square corridor, and low gallery. I guess when the Builders bought their hellfire from Lucifer they must have paid for it with their imaginations.

The Great Stair took me by surprise.

“Here.” Gorgoth halted at a spot where a natural tunnel undercut the passage.

The Great Stair proved to be less grand than I had imagined. No more than ten yards across in any place I could see, and a squeeze at the entrance. At least it was natural though. My eyes had ached for a curved line, and here I could rest them. Some ancient stream had carved a path down a fault-line, stepping by leaps and bounds into the deep places. The waters, long since reduced to a trickle, dripped in a rocky gullet as steep and twisting as a man could hope for.

“Seems we have a climb ahead of us,” I said.

“These stairs are not for the living.” A necromancer insinuated himself into the narrow entrance, pulling himself from the shadows as though they clung like webs. He could have been a twin to the bitch that took the Nuban.

“For Christ’s sake!” I drew my sword and swung on a rising arc in the same motion. His head came off clean. I let the momentum carry me round, and brought the blade down with all my strength, overhand on the pulsing stump of his neck. The blow caught him before he could fall and cut deep, splitting his sternum.

“I’m not interested!” I shouted the words at his corpse as I let its weight pull me to the ground. As with so many things in life, the bringing of death is simply a matter of timing. I made the mistake of giving Chella a moment and she took it. Jane should have told me just to attack her, nothing else, just attack her. Forget running. I had in mind that if my reply to Chella’s first words had been a well-judged sword blow, the Nuban might yet be standing with me.

A savage twist on my sword hilt opened the necromancer’s chest. I keep a little dagger in my boot, wicked sharp. I took it out, and whilst the brothers watched in silence I cut out the necromancer’s heart. The thing pulsed in my hand, warmish, lacking the heat of the living or the cold of the dead. His blood lacked a certain vitality too. When cutting out a heart—and I speak from experience here—expect to be crimson head to toe. The necromancer’s blood looked purple in the torchlight and barely reached past my elbows.

“If any more of you bastards want to waste my time with stupid melodrama, please form an orderly queue.” I let my voice echo down the corridors.

The Nuban once told me about a tribe in Nuba that ate the heart and the brains of their enemies. They thought it gave them their foes’ strength and cunning. I never saw the Nuban do it, but he didn’t dismiss the idea.

I held the heart up to my mouth.

“Prince!” Makin stepped toward me. “That’s evil meat.”

“There is no evil, Makin,” I said. “There’s the love of things, power, comfort, sex, and there’s what men are willing to do to satisfy those lusts.” I kicked the ruin of the necromancer’s corpse. “You think these sad creatures are evil? You think we should fear them?”

I took a bite, as big as I could manage. Raw flesh is chewy, but the necromancer’s heart had some give in it, like a game bird hung until it’s ready to drop off the hook. The bitter gall of the blood scoured my throat. I swallowed my mouthful and it slid down, slow and sour.

I think for the first time Burlow watched me eat without the green eyes of jealousy. I threw the rest of it down. The brothers stood mute, eyes watering from the torch-smoke. That’s the problem with tar-torches, you have to keep moving. I felt a touch odd. I had the feeling you get when you know you really should be somewhere else, as if you’d promised a duel that morning or some such but couldn’t quite remember what it was. Chills ran up my back and along my arms, as if ghosts trailed their fingers over me.

I opened my mouth, then closed it, interrupted by a whisper. I looked around. Whispers came from every corner, just at that maddening level where you can hear the words but not understand them. The brothers started to look around too, nervous.