‘It took a thousand years for someone to do that?’ I reached for my cup, nearly knocking it over.
‘It took a long time for the Mathema to discover all the Builders’ eyes.’ Omar shrugged. ‘And longer still to decide the time was right to share that information with a caliph.’
‘Why now?’
‘Because our equations indicate the Builders may be done with herding and guiding…’
I didn’t want to know what came after that so I took a gulp of my whisky.
‘…it may be time for the slaughtering,’ Omar said.
‘Why for God’s sake?’ What I really meant was, why me? Do it in a hundred years and I wouldn’t give a damn.
‘The magic is breaking the world. The more it’s used the easier it is to use and the wider the cracks grow. Kill us and the problem might go away.’ He watched me, eyes dark and solemn.
‘But destroying Hamada is hardly going to … oh.’
Omar nodded. ‘Everyone. Everywhere. They can do it too.’
Footsteps on the stairs, a dark shape hurrying to Omar’s side, a hasty whispered exchange. I watched, trying to focus, tipping my cup and discovering it empty. ‘Who’s your friend?’
Omar got to his feet and I stood too, his steadiness making me realize quite how much I was swaying. ‘You’re not off?’ The racing finished hours ago.
‘Father has called us all to the palace. This explosion of yours has changed things – perhaps turned theory into fact. We all saw it, then felt it. I was knocked off my feet. Perhaps Father will share with us how and why we were spared. Hopefully he will have a plan to stop it happening again!’ Omar followed the caliph’s messenger toward the stairs, waving. ‘So good to see you alive, my friend.’
I half-sat half-collapsed back into the cushions. Even though he never used it against me I always held the fact that Omar’s father was the caliph of Liba, where mine was only a cardinal, to be a black mark against his name. Even a seventh son looks like a good deal to a man who is tenth in line. Still, when the caliph calls, you come. I couldn’t hold that against Omar, though he had left me to drown my sorrows by myself. Not to mention added to those troubles with his talk of long-dead Builders lurking in ancient machines and wishing us ill. Even drunk I wasn’t about to believe that nonsense, but there was definitely something bad happening.
I stared up at the stars through a gap in the awning. ‘What time is it anyway?’
‘Lacking an hour to midnight.’
I lifted my head and looked around. It had been a rhetorical question. I had thought myself alone up here.
‘Who said that?’ I couldn’t make out any human figures, just low hillocks of cushions. ‘Show yourself. Don’t make me drink alone!’
A black shape detached itself from the most distant corner, close to the roof’s edge and the fifty-foot drop into the street below. For a moment my heart lurched as I thought of Aslaug, but it had been a man’s voice. A lean but well-muscled figure resolved itself, tall but not quite my height, face shrouded in shadow and long dark hair. He walked with the exaggerated care of the quite drunk, clutching an earthenware flask in one hand, and flomped bonelessly into the cushions vacated by Omar.
Moonlight revealed him in a rippling slice, falling through the gap between one awning and the next. The silver light painted him, from a grisly burn that covered his left cheek, down a plain white shirt to the hilt of a sword. A dark eye regarded me, glittering amid the burn, the other lost behind a veil of hair. He raised his flask toward me, then swigged from it. ‘Now you’re not drinking alone.’
‘Well that’s good.’ I took a gulp from my own pewter cup. ‘Does a man no good to drink by himself. Especially not after what I’ve been through.’ I felt very maudlin, as a man in his cups is wont to do without lively music and good company.
‘I’m a very long way from home,’ I said, suddenly as miserable and homesick as I had ever been.
‘Me too.’
‘Red March is a thousand miles south of us.’
‘The Renar Highlands are further.’
For some reason known only to drunkards that angered me. ‘I’ve had a hard time.’
‘These are hard days.’
‘Not just today.’ I drank again. ‘I’m a prince you know.’ Quite how that would get me sympathy I wasn’t sure.
‘Liba is straining at the seams with princes. I was born a prince too.’
‘Not that I’ll ever be king…’ I kept to my own thread.
‘Ah,’ the stranger said. ‘My path to inheritance is also unclear.’
‘My father…’ Somehow my train of thought slipped away from me. ‘He never loved me. A cold man.’
‘My own has that reputation too. Our disagreements have been … sharp.’ The man drank from his flask. The light caught him again and I could see he was young. Even younger than me.
Perhaps it was relief at being safe and drunk and not being chased by monsters that did it, but somehow all the grief and injustice of my situation that there hadn’t been time for until now bubbled up out of me.
‘I was just a boy … I saw him do it … killed them both. My mother, and my…’ I choked and couldn’t speak.
‘A sibling?’ he asked.
I nodded and drank.
‘I saw my mother and brother killed,’ he said. ‘I was young too.’
I couldn’t tell if he were mocking me, topping each of my declarations with his own variant.
‘I still have the scars of that day!’ I raised my shirt to show the pale line where Edris Dean’s sword had pierced my chest.
‘Me too.’ He pushed back his sleeves and moved his arms so the moonlight caught on innumerable silvery seams criss-crossing his skin.
‘Jesus!’
‘He wasn’t there.’ The stranger pulled back into the shadow. ‘Just the hook-briar. And that was enough.’
I winced. Hook-briar is nasty stuff. My new friend seemed to have dived in headfirst. I raised my cup. ‘Drink to forget.’
‘I have better ways.’ He opened his left hand, revealing a small copper box, moonlight gleaming on a thorn pattern running around its lip. He might have better ways than alcohol but he drank from his flask, and deeply.
I watched the box, my eye fascinated by the familiarity of it – but, familiar or not, no part of me wanted to touch it. It held something bad.
Like my new friend I drank too, though I also had better ways of burying a memory. I let the raw whisky run down my throat, hardly tasting it now, hardly feeling the burn.
‘Drink to dull the pain, my brother!’ I’m an amiable drunk. Given enough time I always reach the point where every man is my brother. A few more cups and I declare my undying love for all and sundry. ‘I’m not sure there’s a bit of me that isn’t bruised.’ I lifted my shirt again, trying to see the bruising across my ribs. In the dark it looked less impressive than I remembered. ‘I could show you a camel footprint but…’ I waved the idea away.
‘I’ve a few bruises myself.’ He lifted his own shirt and the moonlight caught the hard muscles of his stomach. The thorn scars patterned him there too, but it was his chest that caught my eye. In exactly the spot where I have a thin line of scar recording the entry of Edris Dean’s sword my drinking companion sported his own record of a blade’s passage into his flesh, though the scar was black, and from it dark tendrils of scar spread root-like across his bare chest. These were old injuries though, long healed. He had fresher hurts – better light would show them angry and red, the bite of a blade in his side, above the kidney, other slices, puncture wounds, a tapestry of harm.
‘Shit. What the hell—’
‘Dogs.’
‘Pretty damn vicious dogs!’
‘Very.’
I swallowed the word ‘bastard’ and cast about instead for some claim or tale that the bastard wouldn’t instantly top.
‘That sibling I mentioned, killed when I saw my mother killed…’
He looked up at me, again just the one eye
glittering above his burn scar, the other hidden. ‘Yes?’
‘Well she’s not properly dead. She’s in Hell plotting her return and planning revenge.’
‘On who?’
‘Me, you.’ I shrugged. ‘The living. Mostly me I think.’
‘Ah.’ He leaned back into the cushions. ‘Well there you’ve got me beat.’
‘Good.’ I drank again. ‘I was starting to think we were the same person.’
The boy came back, refilling my cup from his jug and moving the lanterns closer to us to light our conversation. The man said something to him in the desert tongue but I couldn’t follow it. Too drunk. Also, I don’t know more than the five words I learned in my year living in the city.
With the lamplight showing me the fellow’s face I had a sudden sense of déjà vu. I’d seen him before – possibly recently – or someone who reminded me strongly of him. Pieces of the puzzle started to settle out of my drunken haze. ‘Prince you say?’ Every other rich man in Liba seemed to be a prince, but in the north, where we both clearly came from, ‘prince’ was a richer currency. ‘Where from again?’ I remembered but hoped I was wrong.
‘Renar.’
‘Not … Ancrath?’
‘Maybe … once.’
‘By Christ! You’re him!’
‘I’m certainly someone.’ He lifted his flask high, draining it.
‘Jorg Ancrath.’ I knew him though I’d seen him just the one time, over a year ago in that tavern in Crath City, and he hadn’t sported such a burn then.
‘I’d say “at your service”, but I’m not. And you’re a prince of Red March, eh? Which would make you one of the Red Queen’s brood?’ He made to put his flask down and missed the ground, drunker than he had seemed.
‘I have that honour,’ I said, my lips numb and framing the words roughly. ‘I am one of her many breeding experiments – not one that has best pleased her though.’
‘We’re all a disappointment to someone.’ He swigged again, sinking further back into his cushions. ‘Best to disappoint your enemies though.’
‘These damnable mathmagicians have put us together, you know.’ I knew Yusuf had let me go too easily.
Jorg gave no sign of having heard me. I wondered if he’d passed out. A long pause turned into midnight, as it often does when you’re very drunk. The distant hour bell jolted him into speech. ‘I’ve made plenty of seers eat their predictions.’
‘Got their sums wrong this time though – I’m no use to you. It should have been my sister. She was to have been the sorceress. To stand at your side. Bring you to the throne.’ I found my face wet. I’d not wanted to think about any of this.
Jorg mumbled something, but all I caught was a name. Katherine.
‘Perhaps … she never had a name. She never saw this world.’ I stopped, my throat choked with the foolishness too much drink will put in a man. I drained my cup. There’s a scribe who lives behind our eyes scribbling down an account of events for our later perusal. If you keep drinking then at some point he rolls up his scroll, wraps up his quills, and takes the night off. What remained in my cup proved sufficient to give him his marching orders. I’m sure we continued to mutter drunkenly at each other, King Jorg of Renar and I. I expect we made a few loud and passionate declarations before we passed out. We probably banged our cups on the roof and declared all men our brothers or our foe, depending on the kind of drunks we were, but I have no record of it.
I do remember that I confided my problems with Maeres Allus to the good king, and he kindly offered me his sage advice. I recall that the solution was both elegant and clever and that I swore to adopt it. Sadly not a single word of that counsel remained with me the following day.
My last memory is an image. Jorg lying sprawled, dead to the world, looking far younger in sleep than I had ever imagined him. Me pulling a rug up across him to keep off the cold of the desert night, then staggering dangerously toward the stairs. I wonder how many lives might have been saved if I had just rolled him off the roof’s edge…
Many men drink to forget. Alcohol will wash away the tail end of a night, erasing helpful advice, and the occasional embarrassing incident, whilst trying to weave a path home. Unfortunately if you’ve developed a talent for suppressing older memories, accumulated while depressingly sober, then alcohol will often erode those barriers. When that happens, rather than sleep in the blessed oblivion of the deeply inebriated you will in fact suffer the nightmare of reliving the worst times you’ve ever known. A river of whisky carried me back into memories of Hell.
‘Jesus Christ! What was that thing?’ I gasp it between deep breaths, bent double, hands on my thighs. Looking back I see the raised dust that marks our hasty escape from the small boy and his ridiculously vast dog.
‘You did want to see monsters, Jal.’ Snorri, leaning back against another of the towering stones that punctuate the plain.
‘A hell-hound…’ I straighten up and shake my head. ‘Well I’ve seen enough now. Where’s this fucking river?’
‘Come on.’ Snorri leads off, his axe over his shoulder, the blades finding something bloody in the deadlight and offering it back to Hell.
We trek another mile, or ten, in the dust. I’m starting to see figures in the distance, souls toiling across the plain or clustered in groups, or just standing there.
‘We’re getting closer.’ Snorri waves his axe toward the shade of a man a few hundred yards off, staked out among the rocks. ‘It takes courage to cross the Slidr. It gives many pause.’
‘Looks like more than a lack of courage holding that one back!’ The stakes go through the soul’s hands and feet.
Snorri shakes his head, walking on. ‘The mind makes its own bonds here.’
‘So all these people are doomed to wander here forever? They won’t ever cross over?’
‘Men leave echoes of themselves…’ He pauses as if trying to recall the words. ‘Echoes scattered across the geometry of death. These are shed skins. The dead have to leave anything they can’t carry across the river.’
‘Where are you getting this from?’
‘Kara. I wasn’t going to spend months travelling to death’s door with a völva and not ask her any questions about what to expect!’
I let that one lie. It’s what I did, but then I never had any intention of ending up here.
We slog up a low ridge and beyond it the land falls away. There below us is the river, a gleaming silver ribbon in a valley that weaves away into grey distances, the only thing in all that awful place with any hint of life in it. I start forward but immediately the ground drops in a crumbling cliff a little taller than me and at its base a broad sprawl of hook-briar, black and twisted, as you’ll see in a wood after the first frosts.
‘We’ll have to go a—’ I break off. There’s movement on the edge of the briar. I shift to get a better view. It’s the boy from the milestone, lunging in among the thorns, leaving them glistening. ‘Hey!’
‘Leave him, Jal. It is the way it is. It has been like this for an age before we came and will be like it after we leave.’
If we leave!
‘But…’
Snorri sets off to find an easier route down. I can’t leave, though. Almost as if the briar has me hooked too. ‘Hey! Wait! Keep still and I can get you out.’ I cast about for a way down the cliff that won’t pitch me in among the thorns.
‘I’m not trying to get out.’ The boy pauses his lunging and looks up at me. Even from this distance his face is a nightmare, flayed by the briar, his flesh ripped, studded with broken thorns bedded bone-deep.
‘What…’ I step back as the ground crumbles beneath my foot and sandy soil cataracts over the drop. ‘What the hell are you doing then?’
‘Looking for my brother.’ Blood spills from torn lips. ‘He’s in there somewhere.’
He throws himself back at the thorns. The spikes are as long as his fingers and set with a small hook behind each point to lodge in the flesh.
‘Stop! For Chri
st’s sake!’
I try to climb down where the cliff dips but it breaks away and I scamper back.
‘He wouldn’t stop if it were me.’ The words sound ragged as if his cheeks are torn. I can hardly see him in the mass of the briar now.
‘Stop—’ Snorri’s hand grabs my shoulder and he pulls me away mid-protest.
‘You can’t get caught up in this. Everything here is a snare.’ He walks me away.
‘Me? Hasn’t this place had its hooks in you ever since you first held that key?’ They’re just words though, without heat. I’m not thinking about Snorri. I’m thinking about my sister, dead before she was ever born. I’m thinking about the boy and his brother and what I might do to save my own sibling. Less than that, I say to myself. Less than that.
I woke, still drunk, and with so many devils hammering on the inside of my head that it took me an age to understand I was in a prison cell. I lay there in the heat, eyes tight against the pain and the blinding light lancing in through a small high window, too miserable to call out or demand release. Omar found me there at last. I don’t know how much later. Long enough to pass the contents of a jug of water through me and leave the place stinking slightly worse than I found it.
‘Come on, old friend.’ He helped me up, wrinkling his nose, still grinning. The guards watched disapprovingly behind him. ‘Why do you northerners do this to yourselves? Even if God did not forbid it drinking is a poor bet.’
I staggered out along the corridor to the guards’ room, wincing, and watching the world through slitted eyes. ‘I’m never doing it again, so let’s not talk about it any more. OK?’
‘Do you even remember what happened to you last night?’ Omar caught me as I stumbled into the street and with a grunt of effort kept me on my feet.
‘Something about a camel?’ I recalled some sort of argument with a camel in the small hours of the morning. Had it looked at me wrong? Certainly I’d decided it was responsible for the footprint on my backside and all other indignities I’d ever suffered from the species. ‘Jorg!’ I remembered. ‘Jorg fucking Ancrath! He was up there, Omar! On that roof. You’ve got to warn the caliph!’
The Wheel of Osheim Page 8
