Prince of Thorns (The Broken Empire 1)

“Up?” Makin at least was game to try.

“Up,” I said. “So our poison wafts up, and what hint escapes into the Castle Red paints the folk that live there, the Blushers, an attractive lobster red. Which, my brothers, is what it says the stuff does in this here book handed down through some thousand years to your own sweet Jorgy.”

I spun away from Gorgoth, caught up in my display, and mindful of his fists. “And these poisons, in their interesting boxes, can do all this when what we have is an ancient spill, washed over for a thousand years. So all in all, Brother Burlow, it would be best not to open one with your crowbar, just yet.”

“So what will we do with them, Jorth?” Elban came to lisp at my elbow. “Sounds like dirty work, no?”

“The dirtiest, old man.” I clapped a hand to his shoulder. “We’re going to build a slow fire, bank it well, and run for our lives. The heat will crack open these marvellous toys, and the smoke will make a charnel house of the Castle Red.”

“Will it stop there?” Makin shot me a sharp glance.

“Maybe.” I looked around at the brothers. “Liar, Row, and Burlow, see to finding some fuel for our fire. Bones and tar if you must.”

“Jorg, you said ‘enough to poison the world,’” Makin said.

“The world is already poisoned, Sir Makin,” I said.

Makin pursed his lips. “But this could spread. It could spill out over Gelleth.”

Burlow and the others stopped by the door and turned to watch us.

“My father asked for Gelleth,” I said. “He did not specify the nature of its delivery. If I hand him a smoking ruin, he will thank me for it, by God he will. Do you think there is a crime he would not countenance to secure his borders? Even one crime? Any single sin?”

Makin frowned. “And if the fumes roll into Ancrath?”

“That,” I said, “is a risk that I am prepared to accept.”

Makin turned from me, his hand on his sword hilt.

“What?” I questioned his back, and my voice echoed in the Builders’ dusty vault. I spread my arms. “What? And don’t you dare speak to me of innocents. It is late in the day for Sir Makin of Trent to champion maids and babes in arms.” My anger sprang from more than Makin’s doubt. “There are no innocents. There is success, and there is failure. Who are you to tell me what can be risked? We weren’t dealt a hand to win with in this game, but I will win though it beggar heaven!”

The tirade left me breathless.

“But it’d be so many, Jorth,” Elban said.

You’d think seeing me knife Brother Gemt not so many weeks earlier, over a far smaller dispute, would have taught them sense, but no.

“One life, or ten thousand, I can’t see the difference. It’s a currency I don’t understand.” I set my sword to Elban’s neck, drawing too quick for him to react. “If I take your head once, is that less bad than taking it again, and then again?”

But I had no appetite for it. Somehow losing the Nuban had made what brothers I had left seem more worth keeping, scum though they were.

I put the blade away. “Brothers,” I said. “You know it’s not like me to lose my temper. I’m out of sorts. Too long without sight of the sun perhaps, or maybe something I ate . . .” Rike smirked at the reference to the necromancer’s heart. “You’re right, Makin, to destroy more than the Castle Red would be . . . wasteful.”

Makin turned to face me, hands together now. “As you say, Prince Jorg.”

“Little Rikey, get you just one of those wonderful toys. That one, like a giant’s gonad, if you please.” I pointed out the closest of the spheres. “Don’t drop it mind, and have Gorgoth help out if it’s as heavy as it looks. We’ll take it up a little higher and set it cooking for the castle’s breakfast. One should be enough.”

And we did.

With hindsight, if all the detail were known, Makin’s stand there in the Builders’ vault should be sufficient to wash the blood from his hands, to erase all his crimes, the cathedral at Wexten notwithstanding, and make of him a hero fit to stand beside any that may be found in legend. Given the swathe of death downwind of the Castle Red, it’s clear that the drastic scaling-down of my original plan saved the world from a rather unpleasant death. Or at least delayed it.

35

“We should have seen something by now,” Makin said.

I looked back over my shoulder. The ugly bulk of Mount Honas made a black fist against the sky, the Castle Red cradled in its grip. Behind us the brothers straggled, a line of vagabonds labouring down the slope.

“This death walks softly, Makin,” I said. “An invisible hand with fatal fingers.” I gave him a grin.

“Finding every baby in its crib?” Distaste thinned Makin’s thick lips.

“Would you rather it were Rike that found them, or Row?” I asked. I set a hand to his shoulder, gauntlet to breastplate, both smeared with the grey mud from our escape tunnel. He had it in his hair too, drying on black curls.

“You seem troubled of late, old friend,” I said. “The past sins weigh so heavy that you’re afraid to add more?”

I noticed that we stood nearly of a height, though Makin was a tall man. Another year’s growth and he’d be tilting his head to meet my gaze.

“Sometimes you almost fool me, you’re that good, Jorg.” He sounded weary. I could see the web of fine lines around the corners of his eyes. “We’re not old friends. A little over three years ago you were ten. Ten! Maybe we’re friends, I can’t tell, but ‘old’? No.”

“And what is it that I’m so good at?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Playing a role. Filling in for lost years with that intuition of yours. Replacing experience with genius.”

“You think I have to be old to think with an old head?” I asked.

“I think you need to have lived more to truly know a man’s heart. You need to have made more transactions in life to know the worth of the coin you spend so freely.” Makin turned to watch the column close on us.

Rike came into view at the rear of the line, cresting a ridge, black against a dawn-pale sky. Behind him the clouds ran out in ribbons, the dirty purple of a fresh bruise, reaching for the west. Bandages on his upper arm, and around his brow, flapped in the breeze.

Something tickled at me, the ghosts of whispers, colder than the wind.

Makin turned to go.

“Wait—”

Screams now. The terror of those already dead.

No sound came, but Mount Honas lifted, like a giant drawing breath. A light woke beneath the rock, bleeding incandescence through spreading fissures. In one moment, the mountain vanished, thrown at heaven in a spiralling inferno. And, somewhere within that gyre, every stone of the Castle Red, from deepest vault to tower high.

A brilliance took all glory from the morning, making a pale wash of the land. Rike became a flicker of shadow against the blinding sky. I felt the hot kiss of that distant fury, like sunburn on my cheeks.

What burns so bright cannot endure. The light failed, leaving us in shadow, the kind of darkness that precedes a squall. I saw the storm’s outriders, newborn ghosts, driven before the rage. I watched them sweep out across the land, like the ripple from a pond-thrown stone, a grey ring where rock became dust, racing fast as thought. The sky rippled too, the ribbon-cloud now whips for the cracking.