King of Thorns (The Broken Empire 2)

We built the cairn. Gorgoth brought rocks that no single man would be able to roll away. I don’t know that Maical would have wanted the heads, or cared, or have held any opinion on the matter, but we set them as his honour guard in any case. I don’t know what Maical would have wanted. I never really met him until those last seconds when he lay dying. It surprised me that I cared, but I found that I did.

16

Four years earlier

You can cut seven shades from a man. Scarlet arterial blood, purple from the veins, bile like fresh-cut grass, browns from the gut, but it all dries to somewhere between rust and tar. Time for Red Jorg to take himself to a stream and clean off the fort-men. I watched the dirt swirl away, pinkish in the water.

“So what was that about?” Makin asked, striding up behind.

“They shot my idiot,” I said.

A pause. It seemed that Makin always had that pause with me, as if I were a puzzle to him. “We told you he was dead back in Norwood and you didn’t spare him a moment,” Makin said. “So why now? The truth, Jorg.”

“What is truth?” I asked, washing the last of the blood from my hands. “Pilate said that, you know? ‘What is truth?’”

“Fine, don’t tell me then,” Makin said. “But we have to cross that bridge in a hurry now, before this gets out.”

I stood, shaking water from my hair. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”

With the Brothers saddled and on the road I took a moment to revisit the cairn. Necromancy pulsed in my chest as I approached, an echo of the pain when Father’s knife cut in. An echo of all the flavours of pain that filled me in that moment, stabbed, betrayed, the strength running from me, hot and red. Ravens fluttered away from the heads as I drew close. I stood mute before the mound of dry rocks, mind empty, not knowing what I felt. My eye took in the spatters of yellowed lichen, a quartz vein through a large boulder, the black trickles of blood on stone. It seemed that the heads watched me, as if their raven-pecked eyes were turned toward me. And then, there was no “seemed” about it. As I made a slow circle of the cairn, each head in turn swivelled its gaze to follow me. I had killed the first man with an arrow in the eye. It twitched as he tried to turn that eye my way. I held the gaze of the single eye he could watch me with.

“Jorg.” His lips formed my name.

“Chella?” I asked. Who else could it be? “I thought I buried you deep enough.” For a moment I saw her toppling into that shaft, dragging the Nuban, after I’d shot them both with his bow.

The same smile twisted each man’s lips.

“I’ll find you, bitch,” I spoke low. She had enough ears to hear me.

The heads broadened their smiles to show teeth. Lips moved. It looked like “Dead King” that they mouthed.

I shrugged. “Enjoy the ravens.” And I left them. Whatever power worked here, I doubted it would trouble Maical under such a weight of stone.

We moved on, resupplied from the fort, with replacements for what Gog had burned in the night. Remagen huddled around both shores of the Rhyme, a modest walled town, smoke rising from scores of chimneys lined along well-ordered streets. The bridge held my attention though. I’d not thought of bridges as graceful before, but this one hung glittering between two silver towers taller than the Haunt, suspended on what looked like gleaming wire but must have been cables thick as a man.

Within half an hour we were lined at the town gates, waiting our turn behind pedlars, merchants with their wagons, farmers leading cows or carting ducks and hens. We stowed our weapons out of sight on the horses, but we still looked a rough crowd.

Gorgoth drew looks aplenty, but none of the normal screaming and the running.

“You’ll be with the circus then,” said the farmer with the ducks in wicker cages. He nodded as if agreeing with his statement.

“So we are,” I said before Rike could grumble. “I juggle,” I added, and gave him my smile.

The men at the gates were of the same rag-tag crowd that we found at the fort. The free-town had no soldiers, according to Row, just a loose militia drawn from the population, at the service of the mayor for a month or two then free to go back to their livelihoods.

“Well met.” I clapped my hands to the shoulders of what should have been the gate captain in any decent town. I grinned as if we’d been best friends all our lives. “Jorg the Red and his travelling players, catching up with our colleagues at the circus. I juggle. Would you like to see?”

“No,” he said, trying to shake free. A good answer in the main since I don’t juggle.

“You’re sure?” I asked, finally letting him go. “My friend here does knife tricks. And Little Rikey is famously ugly?”

“Move on,” he said and turned to the tinker behind us.

I passed between the guardsmen—“Care to see some juggling? No?”—and through the gates.

“The bridge is that way,” Makin said, pointing again as he did at the crossroads, as if it weren’t two hundred feet tall and glittering in the morning sunshine.

“Indeed,” I said. “But we’re with the circus.” And I led off to the right, not pointing at the multi-coloured pavilion rising above the rooftops. “I juggle!”

We had to start with the elbows to make a path before we got within clear sight of the pavilion. The people of Remagen were out in their hundreds, packing the streets around the circus, spilling from the taverns and crowding the smaller tents and stalls around the main attraction.

“Must be Sunday,” Sim said, grinning like a boy, which I suppose he was by most accountings.

Rike moved to the front, pushing his way toward the big top. Like Sim he had an eager look on him, the kind of light that toy clown put in him back at the Haunt. I wasn’t the only one who remembered.

“It’s Taproot?” Makin asked, frowning.

I nodded. “Got to be.”

“Excellent,” said Kent. He’d swiped himself three sugar sticks from somewhere and was trying to get all of them in his mouth at once.

We got to the pavilion entrance, laced up all the way down and staked, with the smaller entrance to the side also tagged down. A man and a boy sat in the dust before the door, bent over a wooden board with black and white markers arrayed across it in various depressions.

“Show’s not until sundown,” the man said as my shadow fell across the board. He didn’t look up.

“You’ve got mancala in three if you play from the end pit then the eye pit,” I said.

He looked up sharp enough at that, lifting his bald head on the thickest of necks. “By Christ Jesu! It’s little Jorg!”

He stood and took me under the arms, throwing me a yard in the air before executing a neat catch.

“Ron,” I said. “You used to be strong!”

“Be fair.” He grinned. “You’ve doubled in height.”

I shrugged. “The armour weighs a bit too. Saved my ribs though!” I waved the others forward. “You remember Little Rikey?”

“Of course. Makin, good to see you. Grumlow.” Ron caught sight of Gorgoth. “And who’s the big fellow?”