I walked from the throne-room, taking slow steps, with all eyes on me.
“Red Jorg,” Kent said in a whisper as I passed.
“Red would be good, Kent. But I fear I am darker than that.”
When I opened that box I got more back than memory.
The flames on the torches by the doorway flared as I passed, infecting me with strange passion. I felt watched by more than my court, by more than Sageous and the players who seek to move the Hundred across their board. Gog watched me. From the fire.
I looked back one time, to see Miana beside the throne.
Lord Robert fell in behind me. Captain Keppen and Rike joined us outside.
“Time to jump the falls, old man,” I told Keppen as he stepped beside me. He grinned at that, as if he knew the hour was upon us and shared my hunger for it.
I led the way through my uncle’s halls. Degran no longer haunted me from the shadows, the fact of my guilt no longer came bound in the promise of madness, but I knew my crime even so. Death waited for me on the slopes, one way or another. Death would be good enough. Death at the Prince’s hands, death on the swords of his thousands, or the death Fexler had saved me from when he anchored into Luntar’s little box those forces of necromancy and fire with their hooks sunk so deep into me and their pulls opposing.
And that reminded me. I took the empty box out one last time to toss it aside. Pandora’s own casket had hope lurking within, the last among all the ills unleashed upon us by her misguided curiosity. She might have let hope fly, but not my way. Even so, I looked into the lidless box once more, hand raised to throw it to the floor. And there, on the polished copper interior, one small stain. One last memory? Reluctant to return? I set a finger to it and the darkness of it soaked through my skin, leaving only bright copper behind.
This memory didn’t seize me, didn’t lift me from the now, but settled in as recollection while I walked the Haunt’s corridors. I remembered that last talk with Fexler, back in Grandfather’s castle. Fexler had been considering the box as I held his view-ring to it.
“Sageous?” he had mused over the buzzing of the ring.
“Sageous? That filthy dream-thief did this to me? Put madness in me?”
“Sageous has done far worse than that, Jorg. He put you in the thorns.” Fexler had paused as if remembering. “What kept you there is another matter.”
Every thorn-scar had burned at his words. “Why?” I had asked. “Why would he do that?”
“The hidden hands that move the pieces of your empire have prophecies they like to share. They like to talk of the Prince of Arrow and his Gilden future. And then they have foretelling they are less eager to spread. The hidden hands believe that two Ancraths joined together will end all their power. Will end the game.”
“Two?” I had laughed at that. “They’re safe enough then!”
“When you survived against all odds it seems some value attached to you,” Fexler had said.
And I had grown cold, knowing at the last how the players had tried to keep two Ancraths from joining on their board. They would have seen Olidan’s sons die together. And when I escaped that end and became as useful to their games as Father dear himself, did they let me live because they knew I would never join my cause to his? Or had the possibility been considered long ago and had the wedge between father and son not been driven there entirely by our own hands?
“I will find the heathen and kill him,” I had promised Fexler.
“Sageous is nothing but a savage, straining truth through superstition to dabble in dreams.” Fexler shook his head.
“Still, he’s hard to catch a hold of,” I had said.
“Oh, how I wish he’d go away,” Fexler had replied, his voice half song.
“What?”
“An old rhyme. An ancient rhyme I suppose. Sageous puts me in mind of it. As I was going up the stair I met a man who wasn’t there; he wasn’t there again today; oh, how I wish he’d go away. That’s Sageous for you; the man who wasn’t there. The thing to do of course is to change it around. Oh, how I wish he’d always stay.”
“What?” I wondered if ghosts could grow senile.
Fexler had come in close then and set his ghost-light hand to the box. “But none of this is any use to you until the puzzle of this box is done, this Gordian knot unravelled. I’ll put it in the box.”
“No!” I shouted it. I wouldn’t let him take this memory from me.
“No what?” Fexler had asked.
“I…forget,” I had said.
“No?” Makin asked at my side, back in the corridors of the Haunt, the Prince of Arrow waiting outside with his sword and thousands more behind.
I shook my head. My hand held the empty box, crushed now in my grip, blood on it from old thorn-scars bleeding once more. The box fell from me, and I kicked it to the wall.
“No,” I said. “Just no.”
Father Gomst waited for us in the courtyard. A path had been cleared through the dead. They lay heaped to either side as if it were the road into hell. And the smell of it, Brothers! It made my stomach rumble. And worse, as I walked that path between the corpses, stacked and charred, they twitched. Hands red in ruin flexed at my passing, burned skin sloughing from fingers. Heads lolled, dead eyes found me. The men with me, focused in their purpose, didn’t see it, but I saw, I felt them all, uneasy in their new slumbers as the Dead King watched me through them.
Never open the box.
Death and fire had their hooks in me. Deeper than deep. And each had started to pull.
“I should be tending the dying,” Father Gomst said, almost shouting to be heard over the screaming from the circle gallery where they had been taken.
“Let the dying tend to themselves,” I said. I knew that Father Gomst would have been no comfort to me when I lay groaning in the Heimrift. I saw Grumlow at the keep doors, hanging back in the shadows. I waved him forward. “Show the dying a little mercy, Grumlow,” I said. He nodded and departed.
I knew I would have appreciated Grumlow’s quick sharp mercy back in the Heimrift rather than a slow exit accompanied by Father Gomst’s moralizing.
We walked along the pathway, cleared of the dead, but not the grease of burned flesh, the pieces of skin, the charred outlines of men. No one spoke; even Rike looked grim. It was appropriate though. My uncle, the Duke of Renar, had been a burner. He had spread his own terror that way. And I had come to take the place from him with Gog at my side, filling the courtyard with cremations. The Prince of Arrow had it right when he called the Ancraths the darkest branch of the Steward tree. I had long wondered if I would stand against Orrin of Arrow when he came a-calling. He was perhaps the brightest fruit from the branches of the emperor’s line. In the four years since I claimed the Highlands I had walked the empire, returning at last to suppress cousin Jarco’s uprising in the west, then battled less tangible foes, sickness in my people and in the economy. In the same span the Prince of Arrow had built his strength and taken five thrones. It was perhaps only the repeated whispering of the wise, telling me I must cede him the empire throne, that made me think of opposing his march to the Gilden Gate. I do not like to be told.
Now though, with the copper box torn open and my memories and sins returned to me, I felt that more had been restored, as if I had been a shadow of myself, almost me, but with something vital stolen away, something so bonded to my crimes that Luntar had been forced to set it also into his box of memories. I might not live to see the sun set on this day of blood, but if I did, four years would not pass again and find me no closer to my goals.