Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War 1)

“What the hell happened?” Most of me didn’t want to know, but apparently my mouth did.

“Necromancy.” Snorri took a needle and thread from his pack, something he must have acquired at the circus. Both were covered in an orange paste. Some heathen conceit to keep ill humours out of the wound, no doubt. “No unborn here,” he said. “But a powerful necromancy to return the dead so soon after death.” Another stitch placed. My stomach lurched. “And for the necromancer to not even be present!” He shook his head, then nodded to a spot behind me. “I expect our friend knows more.”

“Buggeration!” Twisting my neck to look reminded me that someone had filled it with broken glass. I edged my whole body around by degrees, keeping my head facing front and centre. Finally Meegan came into view, pale eyes goggling at me over a gag of knotted cloth. Snorri had bound him hand and foot and sat him with his back to a boulder. Saliva clung to the stubble on his chin and his arms trembled, from fear or the cold or both.

“So how are you going to make him talk?” I asked.

“Beat him about, I expect.” Snorri glanced up from his stitching. The needle looked ridiculously small in the great paws of his hands, and at the same time far larger and more pointy than anything I’d want to have to push through my own flesh.

I sniffed. The place stank of death and the wind couldn’t scour it clean. “Edris!” The memory hit me like cold water. I reached for my sword and couldn’t find it.

“Gone.” Snorri sounded a touch disappointed. “The bodies we threw down got up again and scared his lot off. I watched them go.”

“Hell! More of those things?” I’d rather face Edris than another of those grinning corpses with their refusal to play dead and their penchant for throttling me.

Snorri nodded, dipped to bite through the thread, then spat it out. “Can’t climb, though. They weren’t great at it when they were alive. Now?” He shook his head.

I had no desire to look over the edge and see their faces staring up at me, raw fingers clutching at the rocks, climbing, sliding back, climbing again. I remembered the look in those eyes as the thing choked me. Bile rose at the back of my throat. Something different had watched me from those eyes, something far worse than whatever had looked out through them for all the years prior to those last minutes.

Meegan might have scared me back in the tavern, studying me as if I were an insect he would enjoy pulling legs off, but on the mountain he proved one of the least worrying things to look at. “Beating him’s apt to knock him senseless again. And your idea of a beating would probably kill an ox.”

“We can’t kill him,” Snorri said. “Who knows what we’d get?”

“I know that.” I set my forehead in my hand, reminding myself just how much bigger Snorri was than me. “And now he does too. Which isn’t helping our cause.”

“Oh.” Snorri placed another stitch, drawing two ragged edges of his belly together. “Sorry.”

“I say we take his boots off and light a small fire under his feet. He’ll know his only chance of getting off this mountain is to be able to walk. And it won’t take long to loosen his tongue.”

“Look around.” Snorri gestured with the knife he was using to trim a bandage. “No wood. No fire.” He frowned. “That last corpse I threw over, though . . . the arms were burned. How did you do that?” Narrowed eyes focused in on my hands, still blackened.

“It wasn’t me.” It almost sounded true. It couldn’t have been me. “I don’t know.”

Snorri shrugged. “Calm down. I’m not one of your Roma Inquisitors. Just thought it might be useful with Goggle there.” He pointed his knife at Meegan.

I looked at my hands and wondered. It’s often said that cowards make the best torturers. Cowards have good imaginations, imaginations that torment them with all the worst stuff of nightmare, all the horrors that could befall them. This provides an excellent arsenal when it comes to inflicting misery on others. And their final qualification is that they understand the fears of their victim better than the victim does himself.

All this might be true, but I’ve always found myself too scared that somehow, some way, any victim of mine might escape, turn the tables, and work the same horrors on me. Basically the cowards who make good torturers are less cowardly than me. Even so, Meegan did need some encouragement and I needed to understand what had happened with the corpse-man. Snorri had mentioned the Roma Inquisitors, without doubt the most accomplished torturers in the Broken Empire. If I wanted to avoid discussing “my witchcraft” with those monsters, then I would be best advised to understand it myself so as to be rid of it as quickly as feasible and to be able to hide it as effectively as possible.