King of Thorns (The Broken Empire 2)

I scream again and rotate into darkness. A night with only a whisper to give it form. A whispered chant, growing louder.

Topology, tautology, torsion, torture, taunt, taut, tight, taken, taking…taking…take…what’s he trying to take?

Somebody fumbling at my arm, fingers too stupid for the clever catch on the watch. A quick move and I had his wrist, impossibly thick, strong. I dug my thumb into the necessary pressure point. Lundist showed it to me in a book.

“Arrg!” Rike’s voice. “Pax!”

I sat up sharp, breaking the surface, drawing that long-awaited breath, and shaking the darkness from my mind. Topology, tautology, torsion…meaningless webs of words falling from me.

“Rike!” Crouched over me, blocking the too bright sun.

He sneered and sat back. “Pax.”

Pax. Road-speak. Peace, it’s in my nature. An excuse for any crime you’re caught in the middle of. Sometimes I think I should wear the word on my forehead. “Where in hell are we?” I asked. An empty feeling ran through me, welling from my stomach and behind my eyes.

“Hell’s the word.” Red Kent walked over.

I lifted my hand. Sand all over. Sand everywhere in fact. “A desert?”

Two of the fingernails on my right hand were torn away. Gone. It started to hurt. My other nails were torn and split. I had bruises all over.

Gog came out from behind a lone thorn bush, slow as if he thought I might bite.

“I—” I pressed my hand to the side of my head, sand gritty on the skin. “I was with Katherine…”

“And then what?” Makin’s voice from behind.

“I…” Nothing. And then nothing. As if little Jorgy had been too full of the spring’s warmth and possibilities, and then a stone looped out of the shadows and took him off the bough.

I remembered the thorns. The itch and sting of them stayed with me. I lifted my arms. No wounds, but the skin lay red and scabbed. In fact Kent had it too, red as his name suggests. I turned to find Makin, also scabby, leading his horse. The beast looked worse than him, ropes of mucus around its muzzle, blisters on its tongue.

“This is not a good place to be, I’m thinking.” I reached for my knife and found it gone. “What are we doing here?”

“We came to see a man named Luntar,” Makin said. “An alchemist from the Utter East. He lives here.”

“And here is?”

“Thar.”

I knew the name. On the map scroll the word had sat along the edge of the Thurtan grasslands. There had been a burn mark on the map obscuring whatever the name labelled. But perhaps the scorch mark hadn’t been an accident.

“Poisoned land,” Makin said. “Some call them promised.”

A Builders’ Sun had burned here, many centuries ago. The promise was that one day the land would be safe again. I thrust my fingers back into the sand. Not the ones missing fingernails. I could touch the death there. I could roll it between fingertip and thumb. Hot. Death and fire together.

“He lives here?” I asked. “Doesn’t he burn?”

Makin shuddered. “Yes,” he said. “He does.” It takes a lot to make Makin shudder.

The empty feeling gnawed at me, eating away at the questions I most wanted to ask.

“And what,” I said, “did we want from this east-mage?”

Makin held out what he had been holding all along. “This.”

A box. A copper box, thorn-patterned, no lock or latch. A copper box. Not big enough to hold a head. A child’s fist would fit.

“What’s in the box?” I didn’t want to know.

Makin shook his head. “There was a madness in you, Jorg. When you came back.”

“What’s in it?”

“Luntar put the madness in there.” Makin thrust the box back into his saddlebag. “It was killing you.”

“He put my memory in that box?” I asked, incredulous. “You let him take my memory!”

“You begged him to do it, Jorg.” Makin wouldn’t look at me. Rike on the other hand couldn’t stop.

“Give it to me.” I would have reached for it but my hand didn’t want to.

“He told me not to,” Makin said, unhappy. “He told me to make you wait for a day. If you still wanted it after that, you could take it.” Makin bit his lip. He chewed on it too much. “Trust me in this, Jorg, you don’t want to go back to how you were.”

I shrugged. “Tomorrow, then.” Because trust is how a leader binds his men. And because my hands didn’t want that box. They’d rather burn. “Now, where’s my fecking dagger?”

Makin would only look at the horizon. “Best forgotten.”

We moved on, leading the horses, all of us reunited. We headed east, and when the wind blew, the sand stung like nettles. Only Gog and Gorgoth seemed unaffected.

Gog hung back, as if he didn’t want to be near me. “Is it all like this?” I asked him, just to make him look at me. “Even where Luntar lives?”

He shook his head. “The sand turns to glass around his hut. Black glass. It cuts your feet.”

We walked on. Rike marched beside me, sparing the occasional glance. Something had changed in the way he looked at me. As if we were equals now.

I kept my head down and tried to remember. I teased at the hole in my mind. “Hello, Jorg,” she had said.

Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull. I would have back what was mine. I would open the box.

“Hello, Jorg,” she had said. We were by the statue of the girl and her dog, by her grave where sentimental ladies and foolish children bury their animals.

Nothing.

I learned a time ago that if you can’t get what you want by going in the front door, find a back way. I know a back way to that cemetery. Not by a path I wanted to tread, but I would take it even so.

When I was very young, six maybe, a duke called on my father, a man from the north with white-blond hair and a beard down his chest. Alaric of Maladon. The Duke brought a gift for my mother, a wonder of the old world. Something bright and moving, swirling within glass, first lost in the hugeness of the Duke’s hand and then in the folds of Mother’s dress.

I wanted that thing, half-seen and not understood. But such gifts were not for tiny princes. My father took it and set it in the treasury to gather dust. I learned this much from quiet listening.

The treasury in the Tall Castle lies behind an iron door, triple-locked. Not a Builder-made door, but a work of the Turkmen, black iron set with a hundred studs. When you’re six, most locked doors present a problem. This one presented several.

Of all memories, the first I have is of leaning from a high parapet into the teeth of a gale, with the rain lashing and me laughing. The next is of hands pulling me back.

If you’re determined, if you set your mind, there are never enough hands to pull you back. By the time I reached six I knew the outside of the Tall Castle as well as I knew the inside. The Builders left little for a climber to use, but centuries of tinkering by the Ancraths, and the House of Or before us, had provided plenty of footholds, at least plenty of ones deep enough for a child.