King of Thorns (The Broken Empire 2)

“Really?” Rike growled, sitting on the largest of the stones. I’d never heard him use sarcasm before. I guessed he must have been saving it for extreme circumstances.

“Stand a moment, Rike,” I said.

And he did. I lifted the point of my sword to his side. With a stab and a twist I took Burlow’s severed hand away, tearing off the patch of tunic it had a grip on, and flicked it into the swamp.

“We’ve wandered into hell,” Grumlow said with conviction. “We got lost and now we’re in hell.” He had mud plastered up one side of his face and blood clotting in his moustache, trickles of it making crimson trails from nose to lip.

“Hell smells better,” I said.

With the horses around us the mound was crowded and our sightlines blocked. I pushed the grey aside, slapping her rump. Of the five horses left to us she was the only one relaxed enough to crop at the short grass.

“We should go,” Makin said.

We should, but where to? The horizon offered nothing. Except, perhaps…

“Is that the sea?” I pointed. To the east a hint of black or blue lined the farthest reaches of the marsh.

A sharp cry cut off anyone inclined to answer. I spun toward the sound. Just behind us, thigh-deep in water, chest-deep in rushes, Chella held Young Sim by the throat and head. She took another step back away from the mound, dragging Sim. It seemed that she had done something to him, to his neck maybe, for his arms hung limp at his side though he watched us with wild eyes. We called him Young Sim and he had perhaps sixteen years, but when it came to killing he was an old hand and he would not have gone easy without good reason.

“Jorg, you shouldn’t run from me,” Chella said. The water had washed away the mud though it couldn’t take the bog-stain from her skin, the colour of old teak. The Celtic patterns scrolling across her were deep-set too, not the paint I had once thought them. A needle must have placed those swirls and knots along her arms, reaching across her sides.

“I don’t want any part of you, necromancer.” I still held the Nuban’s bow, though I hadn’t reloaded it. I aimed at her, assuming she wouldn’t pay close attention to the number of bolts in place. “Whatever power I consumed is fading from me. Slower than I would like it to fade, but it will be gone and I won’t be sorry. I want no part of you or your dirty trade.”

She smiled. “The Dead King won’t let you go, Jorg. He’s gathering all our kind to him. Black ships wait to take us to the Drowned Isles.”

I made no reply. My anger had subsided once I vowed to destroy Chella. Vengeance is patient when it needs to be and she sought to use the Brothers against me to enrage me, to set me chasing her into the drowning pools. I didn’t let her know how deep her hooks had sunk.

“You’re not going to ask me to release your brother, Jorg?” She dragged Sim a yard farther back.

Row had an arrow trained on her and Grumlow looked ready to throw his knife this time. Grumlow had a soft spot for Sim: fear wouldn’t stay his hand.

“So, you have my brother. Eat his heart and we will be even. Back to where we started,” I said. I knew she wouldn’t be letting go of Sim. She just wanted me to ask.

“Oh, you can’t go back, Jorg. You should know that. You can never go back. Not even if every trace of necromancy left you. Look!” She made a quick change of grip and jerked Sim’s head to the right. Far too far to the right. The grating of bone set my teeth on edge. “Annnnnd…” She rotated his head slowly back to face us. “He’s back. But he’s not the same now, is he?”

“Bitch!” Row released his arrow. Whether his hand trembled or Chella moved faster than I could see I don’t know, but the arrow ended up jutting from Sim’s eye.

“Now see what you’ve done.” Her red mouth smiling, her eyes seductive, and she whispered in Sim’s ear.

Grumlow threw his knife but Chella was already falling. It may have cut her, but the waters closed over her before I could tell.

Sim, despite his arrow and his broken neck, remained standing. And then he took an uncertain step toward us. The clear water between the rushes clouded as the mud below began to stir.

“The sea,” I shouted. I pointed for good measure. The Prince of Arrow had advised me to see the ocean and it looked as though it might be the last thing I did. The Brothers needed no encouragement. We set off running, hoping that Brother Sim would prove as slow as the other dead men and not as fast as we remembered him.

Brother Row you can trust. Trust him to lie, trust him to cheat, perhaps to betray. Most of all trust him to be true to what he is, a weasel, a killer in the dark, handy in the fight. Trust in all that and he will not disappoint.

33

Four years earlier

The sea air added no more than a salt tang to the rankness of the Cantanlona bogs. I could see a grey expanse of water now, still miles off.

“At least they’re slow,” Kent said. He splashed along beside me, axe in hand. He risked a backward glance. Running in a marsh with a sharp axe whilst looking over your shoulder is not to be advised. But then again, nothing we had done for two days was advisable.

The sea breeze carried a low moaning with it. I tried not to worry about that.

We pressed on, unwilling to rest after the last time. Four horses followed us, Row’s having taken a broken ankle after putting its leg down a mud-hole. I made Kent cut its legs off once Row had slit its throat. “I’m not having Chella stand him up again and have her dead men ride after us.”

The sea kept looking bigger by the minute. We’d soon be in the salt marsh.

“Jesus please us.” Row stopped dead ahead of me. Of all the Brothers he was the one least likely to call on divine aid.

I came to his shoulder. The tufted marshland we’d been crossing ended without warning and a long stretch of mudflats reached out before us, eventually giving over to reed-beds after two hundred yards or so. The heads were what stopped Row, not the mud.

Every five yards, like cabbages in a field, a head stuck up from the flats. The closest ones stopped moaning and swivelled their eyes to watch us.

The one by Row’s feet, a woman of middle years, slightly jowly, strained to see our faces. “God save me,” she said. “Save me.”

“You’re alive?” I knelt beside her on one knee, the mud firm beneath me, like wet clay.

“Save me!” A shriek now.

“They’re underneath.” A man to our left, Makin’s age maybe, black-bearded, the mud only in the lower parts of his beard as if rain had washed him clean.

I reached out with the necromancy lurking in my fingertips. I could sense no more death in this mud than in any other part of the bog. Except around the people themselves. I could feel the life leaching out of them—being replaced by something less vital, but more durable.

“They’re tearing my skin off!” The man’s voice rose to a howl.

To our right, a younger woman, black hair flowing down into the mud. She raised her face to us, the skin mottled with dark veins like those on my chest. She snarled. A deep throaty sound, full of hunger. And behind her another woman who might have been her sister. “They come at night. Dead children. They give us sour water and feed us awful things. Awful things.” She hung her head again.