The Wheel of Osheim (The Red Queen's War 3)

I tried to laugh again. Grandmother had said her war with the Lady Blue was about the end of the world. I hadn’t taken her literally. Or rather, I had understood the words but not absorbed them. Yes the Builders had cracked the world when they turned their wheel, yes mages like Kelem, Sageous and the rest cracked it wider each time they worked their magics . . . but the end? I knew the Lady Blue’s ambitions lay in whatever followed the ruin of everything we held, but that had always been years away, a problem for later. Even with Grandmother’s departure for Slov I hadn’t really thought everything was at stake. Not the whole world. Red March maybe or the lands around Osheim. But I’d always imagined that there would be somewhere to run to, somewhere to hide.

At least I understood now the urgency . . . or desperation . . . that had taken the Red Queen from her throne, leaving her beloved city in peril, to war in a distant land at an age when many grandmothers sit grey and wrinkled, knitting quietly in a corner and counting away the last of their days.

“Months!” I said the word again to see if it tasted any better. It didn’t. I may have once said that six months was forever but right now it felt distinctly less than enough. For some reason Darin’s baby popped into my mind, even though all I’d seen of her were plump pink legs waving and plump pink arms reaching for Micha’s milk-heavy breasts. And frankly I hadn’t been looking at the baby. Six months wouldn’t take her very far.

“For you, less than a week if your walls don’t hold.” Luntar reached into his cloak and my sword came up between us. “Months for the world.”

“A week!” I yelped. “Less than a week?” How far could I get on a fast horse in less than a week? “This isn’t right! An attack here? Is an army coming? Is it the Dead King? Someone needs to do something! We need—”

“A gift, Gholloth.” Luntar ignored my panic and drew out a white box, a cube six inches deep. “You once gave me a copper box in your possession and it proved very useful. Now I return the favour.” Apart from the pale pink smears, where his burns had smeared the surface, the box was without design or ornament, a cube with rounded corners, made of white bone. Ivory perhaps . . . or . . .

“It’s plasteek?” I asked. “A Builder thing?” I tried to keep my voice steady but the words “less than a week” kept running through my mind, along with images of my new horse, Murder, waiting for me in the stables.

“It is plasteek, yes.” Luntar placed the box beside Garyus.

“What’s inside?” I asked before my great-uncle could get the words past the twist of his mouth.

“Ghosts.”

ELEVEN

We hurried into the throne room to interrogate Luntar within the protection of the Red Queen’s strongest wards. All the way there I had to keep stopping to chivvy Garyus’s bearers along as they negotiated the palanquin through the palace. I managed, at least when not looking at Luntar, to convince myself that I shouldn’t take the predictions of some random soothsayer too seriously. Looking at the skinless horror of him it was hard to imagine him some charlatan. Even so, as a drowning man will clutch at floating straws, I still clutched at the idea he might be wrong, or at least lying.

The throne room had never been a place of crowds or colour. In the days since the Red Queen departed things had changed. With Garyus’s palanquin set before Grandmother’s high chair, the hall seemed to have taken on a new life. In addition to his nurses the old man had a rota of musicians come and go, filling the air with the songs and sounds of a dozen nations while he dealt with the petitions of his subjects. He spoke mainly to merchants both high and low, his thesis being that nations run on trade and produce, everything else being secondary.

He’d told me, “They say that money is the root of all evil, Jalan, and it may be so. But it is also the root of a great many things that are good. Clothe your people, fill their bellies, and peace may follow. Want makes war.”

That relaxed atmosphere vanished on our hasty arrival, the scattering of courtiers sensing that a prince’s funeral wasn’t the worst this day had to offer.

Garyus’s attendants laid him on a couch with a great many cushions supporting him in what looked to be the least uncomfortable position. I stood beside him, my foot tapping involuntarily as we watched the palace guards usher the last of the day’s supplicants from the room. The day’s players, a group of gypsies from the distant isle of Umber, packed up their pipes and music double quick.

“What news from the outer city?” Garyus asked.