King of Thorns (The Broken Empire 2)

11

Wedding day

Mountains are a great leveller. They don’t care who you are or how many.

Some have it that the Builders made the Matteracks, drinking the red blood of the earth to steal its power, and that the peaks were thrown up when the rocks themselves revolted and shrugged the Builders off. Gomst tells it that the Lord God set the mountains here, ripples in the wet clay as he formed the world with both hands. Whoever it was that did the work, they have my thanks. It’s the Matteracks that put the “high” into the Renar Highlands. They march on east to west, wrinkling the map through other kingdoms, but it’s in the Highlands that they do their best work. Here it’s the Matteracks that say where you can and can’t go.

It’s been said once or twice that I have a stubborn streak. In any case I have never subscribed to the idea that a king can be told where he can’t go in his own kingdom. And so in the years since arriving as a callow youth, in between learning the sword song, mastering the art of shaving, and dispensing justice with a sharp edge, I took to mountain climbing.

Climbing, it turned out, was as new to the people of the Highlands as it was to me. They knew all about getting up to places they needed to be. High pastures for the wool-goats, the summer passes for trade, the Eiger cliff for hunting opals. But about getting to places they didn’t need to go…well who has time for that when their belly grumbles or there’s money to be made?

“What in hell are you doing, Jorg?” Coddin asked me once when I came back bloody, with my wrist grinding bone at every move.

“You should come out with me,” I told him, just to see him wince. I climb alone. In truth there’s never room for two on a mountaintop.

“I’ll rephrase,” said Coddin. I could see the grey starting in his hair. Threads of it at his temples. “Why are you doing it?”

I pursed my lips at that, then grinned at the answer. “The mountains told me I couldn’t.”

“You’re familiar with King Canute?” he asked. “It’s not a path I advise for you—since you pay me for advising these days.”

“Heh.” I wondered if Katherine would climb mountains. I thought she would, given half a chance. “I’ve seen the sea, Coddin. The sea can eat mountains whole. I might have the occasional difference of opinion with the odd mountain or two, but if you catch me challenging the ocean you have my permission to drop an ox on me.”

I told Coddin that stubbornness led me to climb, and perhaps it did, but there’s more to it. Mountains have no memory, no judgments to offer. There’s a purity in the struggle to reach a peak. You leave your world behind and take only what you need. For a creature like me there is nothing closer to redemption.

“Attack,” Miana had said, and surely a man shouldn’t refuse his wife on their wedding day. Of course it helped that I had planned to attack all along. I led the way myself, for the sally ports and the tunnels that lead to them are known to few. Or rather many know of them but, like an honest priest, few would be able to show you one.

We walked four abreast, the tallest men hunched to save scraping their heads on rough-hewn stone. Every tenth man held a pitch torch and at the back of our column they almost choked on the smoke. My own torch showed little more than the ten yards of tunnel ahead, twisting to take advantage of natural voids and fissures. The tramp tramp of many feet, at first hypnotic, faded to background noise, unnoticed until without warning it stopped. I turned and flames showed nothing but my swinging shadow. Not a man of my command, not a whisper of them.

“What is it that you think you’re doing here, Jorg?” The dream-witch’s words flowed around me, a river of soft cadence, carrying only hints of his Saracen heritage. “I watch you from one moment to the next. Your plans are known before you so much as unfold them.”

“Then you’ll know what it is I think I’m doing here, Sageous.” I cast about for a sign of him.

“You know we joke about you, Jorg?” Sageous asked. “The pawn who thinks he’s playing his own game. Even Ferrakind laughs about it behind the fire, and Kelem, still preserved in his salt mines. Lady Blue has you on her sapphire board, Skilfar sees your future patterned on the ice, at the Mathema they factor you into their equations, a small term approximated to nothing. In the shadows behind thrones you count for little, Jorg, they laugh at how you serve me and know it not. The Silent Sister only smiles when your name is spoken.”

“I’m pleased to be of some service then.” To my left the shadows on the wall moved with reluctance, slow to respond to the swing of my torch. I stepped forward and thrust the flames into the darkest spot, scraping embers over the stone.

“This is your last day, Jorg.” Sageous hissed as flame ate shadow and darkness peeled from stone like layers of skin. It pleased me no end to hear his pain. “I’ll watch you die.” And he was gone.

Makin nearly walked into me from behind. “Problem?”

I shook off the daydream’s tatters and picked up my pace. “No problems.” Sageous liked to pull the strings so gently that a man would never suspect himself steered. To make Sageous angry, to make him hate, only eroded the subtle powers he used. My first victory of the day. And if he felt the need to taunt me then I must have worried him somehow. He must have thought I had some kind of chance—which made him a hell of a lot more optimistic than I was.

“No problems. In fact the morning is just starting to look up!”

Another fifty yards and a stair took us onto the slopes via a crawl space beneath a vast rock known as Old Bill.

When you leave the Haunt you are immediately among mountains. They dwarf you in a way that high walls and tall towers cannot. In the midst of the heave and thrust of the Matteracks, all of us, the Haunt itself, even the Prince of Arrow’s twenty thousands, were as nothing. Ants fighting on the carcass of an elephant.

Out on those slopes in the coldness of the wind, with the mountains high and silent on all sides, it felt good to be alive, and if it had to be, it was a good day to die.

“Have Marten take his troops and hold the Runyard for me,” I said.

“The Runyard?” Makin said, wrapping his cloak tight against the wind. “You want our best captain to secure a dead end valley?”

“We need those men, Jorg,” Coddin said, straightening from his crawl. “We can’t spare ten soldiers, let alone a hundred of our best.” Even as he argued he beckoned a man to carry my orders.

“You don’t think he can hold it?” I asked.

And that set Makin running in a new direction. “Hold it? He’d hold the gates of heaven for you, that man; or hell. Lord knows why.”

I shrugged. Marten would hold because I’d given him what he called salvation. A second chance to stand, to protect his family. For four years he had studied nothing but war, from arrow to army, the four years since he came to the castle with Sara at his side. In the end he would hold because years ago in the ruins of his farm I had given his little girl a wind-up clown and Makin’s clove-spice. A Builder toy to make her smile and the clove-spice to take her pain, and her life. The drug stole her away rather than the waste, and she died smiling at sweet dreams instead of choking on her own blood.