Nature shaped the claw to trap, and the tooth to kill, but the thorn … the thorn’s only purpose is to hurt. The thorns of the hook-briar are like to find the bone. They do not come out easy. If you make a stone of your mind, if you thrash and tear, if you break and pull and bite, if you do these things you will leave the briar for it cannot hold a man who does not wish to be held. You will escape. Not all of you, but enough to crawl. And crawling, I left the briar. And reached my brother.
We died together. As we always should have.
A cold stone hall. Echoing. The ceiling black with smoke. Whimpers of pain. Not human pain, but familiar nonetheless.
‘One more,’ Father said. ‘He has a leg left to stand on, does he not, Sir Reilly?’
And for once Sir Reilly would not answer his king.
‘One more, Jorg.’
I looked at Justice, broken and licking the tears and snot from my hand. ‘No.’
And with that Father took the torch and tossed it into the cart.
I rolled back from the sudden bloom of flame. Whatever my heart told me to do, my body remembered the lesson of the poker and would not let me stay. The howling from the cart made all that had gone before seem as nothing. I call it howling but it was screaming. Man, dog, horse. With enough hurt we all sound the same.
I looked into the flame and found it that same incinerating incandescence which had waited for me at the end of my tunnel, blind, white hunger, blind, white pain. Flesh knows what it wants and will refuse the fire whatever you have to say about the matter.
But sometimes flesh must be told.
‘I.’
I couldn’t do it, Brothers.
‘Can’t.’
Have you ever dared a jump, perhaps from some untold height into clear waters and found that at the very edge you simply cannot? Have you hung from four fingers above an empty span of yards, hung by three fingers and by two, and known in that moment that you can’t drop? While any grip remains, your flesh will save itself in the face of all odds.
The heat of that fire. The fierceness of the blaze. And Justice twisting in its heart, screaming. I couldn’t do it.
I could not.
And then I could. I leapt. I let myself drop. I held my dog. I burned.
A dark sky, a tugging wind. It could be anywhere or any when, and yet I knew I had never been here.
‘You found me, then?’
William, seven years to him, golden curls, soft child’s flesh, Justice curled at his feet. The old hound lifted his head at the scent of me, his tail beating once, twice against the ground. ‘Down, boy.’ William set his hand between those long ears.
‘I found you.’ We shared a smile.
‘I can’t get in.’ He waved at the golden gates towering behind us.
I walked across and set a hand to them. The warmth filled me with promises. I pulled away.
‘Heaven is over-rated, Will.’
He shrugged and patted our dog.
‘Besides,’ I said. ‘It’s not real. It’s a thing we’ve made. A thing that men have built without knowing it, a place made out of expectation and hope.’
‘It’s not real?’ He blinked at that.
‘No. Nor the angel. Not a lie, but not real either. A dream dreamt by good men, if you like.’
‘So what is death, really?’ he asked. ‘I think I have a right to know. I’ve been dead for years. And here you are, five minutes in, knowing it all. What is real if it’s not this?’
I had to grin at that. The older brother all over.
‘I don’t know what real really is,’ I said. ‘But it’s deeper than this.’ I waved at the golden gates. ‘Fundamental. Pure. And it’s what we need. And if there’s a heaven it’s better than this and requires no gates. Shall we find out?’
‘Why?’ Will lay back, still scratching between Justice’s ears.
‘Did you see your nephew?’ I asked.
Will nodded, hiding a shy smile.
‘If we don’t do this, he’s going to burn. Him and everyone else. And it will get pretty crowded around here. So help me find it.’ No half-measures. No compromise. Save them all, or none.
‘Find what?’
‘A wheel. That’s how Fexler thought of it. And expectations seem to matter here.’
‘Oh, that?’ Will hid a yawn and pointed.
The wheel stood on a hilltop, black against a mauve sky, horizontal on a raised shaft that sunk down into the stone. We walked across to it. The sky lightening above us, fractures spreading across it through which a whiter light bled.
From the hilltop we could look down over the dry lands, sloping away into darkness.
‘I’m sorry I left you, Will.’
‘You didn’t leave me, Brother,’ he said, shaking away some fragment of a dream.
I put both hands to the wheel, cold steel, gleaming. Builder-made. Builder-steel. ‘We need to turn this back and lock it off. It will take both of us to do it.’ I hoped I had the strength. My arms looked strong, smooth and corded with muscle. For some reason that smoothness surprised me, as if there should be something written there, old scars perhaps. Had there been scars once? But that was the past and I had let it go. It had let me go. ‘We need to turn it.’
‘If anyone knows how to push, it’s us.’ Will set his hands to the steel. ‘Can this save them?’
‘I think so. I think it can save them all. All the children. Even the dead ones. Even Marten’s son, Gog, Degran, Makin’s daughter, let loose from the dreams of men and given over to whatever was made for them.
‘At the very least the Builders’ machines won’t scorch everyone we ever knew from the face of the Earth.’
‘Sounds good enough.’
And so we strained to turn the wheel.
There was no wheel of course, no golden gates, no hill, no dry lands. Just two brothers trying to right a wrong.
54
And we must assume I succeeded. We are, after all, still here. I’m writing this journal, rather than being poisoned dust blowing on a sterile wind. And the magic that joined us at the last, that let me see beyond death with his eyes, that magic is ended. All magic is ended, cut off at the source, the wheel turned, the old reality from which we strayed so long, restored again.
I set the words here in Afrique-ink, dark as the secrets they ground up to make it. My hand traces its path across the whiteness of the page and the black trail of my days can be followed. Followed from the day I shook that snow globe, and understood that sometimes the only change to matter must be worked from without. Followed from that day to this day – this day that woke with the morning sun over Vyene, with the blue Danoob flowing silent and swift through the heart of the Unbroken Empire.
Little Will runs into the room. He comes often now, though his mother tells him not to.
‘Jorg!’ he says, and I appear.
‘Yes.’
‘You’re not my daddy. Marten says so.’
‘I’m a memory of him. And men are made of memories, Will.’ It’s the best I have to tell him.
‘Uncle Rike says you’re a ghost.’
‘Uncle Rike is something that fell from a horse’s backside, crudely fashioned into the shape of an ugly man,’ I say.
Will giggles at that. Then serious, ‘But you’re white like a ghost. Nana Wennith says you can see through ghosts and I can see—’
‘Yes, my emperor,’ I say. ‘I am a ghost. A data-ghost, an extrapolation, a compilation. A billion moments captured. Your father lived much of his life in a building made a thousand years ago.’
‘The Tall Castle.’ He smiles. ‘I’ve been there!’
‘A building with many ancient eyes and many ancient ears. And in later life he carried a special ring. He watched through it, and it watched him. A man … a ghost, called Fexler, needed to understand your father, needed to know if he could be trusted to save the world.’
‘He wanted to know if he was good enough,’ Will says.
I hesitate and hide my smile. �
�He wanted to know if Jorg was the right man. So he did what machines do when they have a complicated question to answer. He built a model. And that model is me.’
‘I wish I had my real father,’ Will says. He is only six. Tact may yet arrive.
‘I wish you did too, Will,’ I say. ‘I’m only an echo and I feel only an echo of the love he would have had for you. But it’s a very loud echo.’
He smiles and I know then that not all magic is gone from the world. The kind that burns – that has gone. Men will no longer fly, or cheat death of its due. But a deeper, older, and more subtle enchantment persists. The kind that both breaks and mends hearts and has always run through the marrow of the world. The good kind.
Will grins again and runs out of the room. Small boys have little patience. I watch the doorway through which he ran, and wonder what might come through it next. I could predict of course. I could build a model. But where would the fun be in that now?
One thing I do know is that it won’t be Jorg of Ancrath who walks in through that doorway. Men are supposed to be scared of ghosts, not ghosts of men. A man may fear his own shadow, but here is a pale shadow that fears the man who cast him. Jorg of Ancrath will not return though. The magic has been shut off, enchantment has run from the world. Death is, once again, what it was.
I watch the door but no one comes. I make Miana sad. She spends her time watching the young emperor grow. Katherine thinks me a nothing, just numbers trying to count themselves, trying to measure a man who was beyond measures, perhaps beyond her dreams even. I watch the door then give up. Fexler will watch it for me. He watches them all.
Instead I sink down into the deep and endless seas of the Builders. Wheels within wheels, worlds within worlds, possibilities without end.
All of us have our lives. All of us our moment, or day, or year. And Jorg of Ancrath assuredly had his, and it has been my place to tell it.
He has gone beyond me now though, and I have no more to say. Perhaps somewhere Jorg and his brother have found the real heaven and are busy giving them hell. It pleases me to think so.
But the story is done.
Finis
An afterthought
If you’ve got this far then you will have read three books and several hundred thousand words on the life and times of Jorg Ancrath. It will now be apparent that you’re not going to be reading any more – and you might, with some justification, wonder why I have chosen to shoot what could well have been a cash cow squarely between the eyes.
The easiest and best answer is that the story demanded it. I acknowledge that I could have told the story to go jump off a bridge and turned events in a direction that allowed me to produce a book 4, a book 5, 6 etc. In years to come when I’m eating cat food cold from the tin I may wish that I had. The truth is though, that I wanted you to part company with Jorg on a high. I would rather readers finish book 3 wanting more than wander away after book 6 feeling they have had more than enough. There is a tendency for characters who march on past their sell-by date to become caricatures of themselves – to tread the same ground, growing more stale with each step. I hope Jorg avoided that fate and that together we’ve built something of worth.
I also very much hope you’ll buy my next book!
Acknowledgments
I need to thank my reader, Helen Mazarakis, for reading this whole trilogy one chunk at a time over the course of many years and telling me what she thought.
Sharon Mack who poked me into submitting my Prince of Thorns manuscript deserves another shout out. Thank you, Sharon.
My editor, Jane Johnson, is a marvel and has helped my career immensely on many fronts – very likely on occasions I know nothing about as well. I’ve also loved reading her books.
Also at Voyager, Amy McCulloch has worked hard on my behalf. I wish her great success with her first fantasy novel, due out this year.
And finally a round of applause for my agent, Ian Drury, for getting my work in front of people who were willing to take a chance on it, and for continuing to sell my books across the world. Gaia Banks and Virginia Ascione, working with Ian at Sheil Land Associates Ltd, have also exceeded all my hopes by getting Jorg’s story into so many translations.
About the Author
Mark Lawrence is married with four children, one of whom is severely disabled. His day job is as a research scientist focused on various rather intractable problems in the field of artificial intelligence. He has held secret level clearance with both US and UK governments. At one point he was qualified to say ‘this isn’t rocket science … oh wait, it actually is’.
Between work and caring for his disabled child, Mark spends his time writing, playing computer games, tending an allotment, brewing beer, and avoiding DIY.
http://www.facebook.com/MarkLawrenceBooks
Twitter: @mark__lawrence
Also by Mark Lawrence
Prince of Thorns
King of Thorns
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Published by HarperVoyager
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Copyright © Mark Lawrence 2013
Mark Lawrence asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780007439065
Ebook Edition © August 2013 ISBN: 9780007439072
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The Broken Empire Trilogy Omnibus Page 107
