The Wheel of Osheim

by Mark Lawrence

  ‘Ballessa said an odd thing.’ Darin kept his eyes on the flames and I could imagine he hadn’t spoken. ‘She said she passed by Father’s chambers the afternoon he died and heard him shouting something about the devil … and his daughter.’

  ‘Father doesn’t have a daughter,’ Martus said, with the kind of firmness that indicated if some bastard child were discovered she should be forgotten again pretty damn quick.

  ‘Daughter?’ I watched the flames too. Ballessa wasn’t given to flights of fancy. You would have to look far and wide to find a woman more firmly grounded than the major-domo of Roma Hall. ‘He was just drunk and shouting nonsense. He was in his cups when I saw him a few days back.’

  Darin looked at me with a frown. ‘Father hadn’t drunk for weeks, brother, not since he came back from Roma. The maids told me it was true. You can’t hide anything from the people who clean up after you.’

  ‘I—’ I didn’t have anything to say to that. Father had said it for me. He wished that he had done a better job of being a father. Now I wished that I had been a better son.

  ‘Jula was with him at the end,’ Darin said.

  ‘He died alone! That’s what I was told!’ I looked at my brother but he kept his eyes forward.

  ‘A cardinal shouldn’t die alone with a cook, Jal.’ Martus gave a snort.

  ‘She was there, even so,’ Darin said. ‘She brought him his broth personally. She’s been his cook longer than any of us have been his sons.’

  ‘And Jula said?’

  ‘That he faded quietly and she thought he’d fallen asleep. Then, seeing how pale and still he was she thought him dead. But he surprised her. At the end he was violent, struggling to rise – mouthing words but making no sound.’ Darin looked away from the burning pyre, up, past the smoke, into the blue heavens. ‘She said he seemed possessed. Like a different person. She said his eyes met hers and in that moment he reached for his seal beside the bed, and on touching it collapsed back to his pillows. Dead.’

  Neither Martus nor I had an answer for that. We stood in silence, listening to the crackle of the flames. The breeze rippled through the smoke and for a moment I saw shapes there, one moving into the next, almost a grasping hand, almost a face, almost a skull … all of them disturbing.

  It took half an hour before the coffin fell in with a dull crash, a scattering of blazing logs and a maelstrom of sparks lofted toward the heavens. The heat reached us even on the upper tiers, red upon our faces. The archbishop signalled and the palace flag was lowered to indicate the start of mourning and that we could leave.

  ‘Well, it’s done.’ And Hertet levered himself up then stomped off down to the courtyard. Others took their cue and followed. Some lingered. My cousin Serah turned to offer my brothers and me her condolences for Uncle Reymond, Rotus shook our hands. Micha DeVeer waited for her Darin at the margins of the courtyard in her black dress, a milk-nurse beside her with my niece, pink and pudgy in her mourning cloth. Barras and Lisa said their words, kind ones, but they rolled off me. And finally it was just three brothers, and the possibly empty box on the tier behind us.

  ‘I’m going to get drunk tonight.’ Darin stood. ‘We never saw the best of that man. Maybe our sons will never see the best of us. I’ll say a prayer for him, then drink a drink.’

  ‘I’ll join you.’ Martus got to his feet. ‘I’ll drink to Uncle Hertet taking the forever nap before the Red Queen quits the throne. Christ, I’d see Cousin Serah take the crown before that old bastard.’ He slapped his hands to his upper arms. ‘You’ll join us, Jalan. You’re good at drinking at least.’ And with that he set off down the steps.

  ‘Steward.’ Darin bowed to the palanquin, put a hand to my shoulder, then followed Martus.

  ‘How stand our defences?’ Garyus’s voice emerged from behind the curtains.

  ‘The west wall is crumbling. Sections need to be underpinned. The suburbs need to be burned and razed. Martus’s men are bored and picking fights with the guard. We’re short a hundred crossbows and half our scorpions are in want of maintenance if they’re to fire more than twice before breaking. Grain reserves are a third of what they should be. Apart from that we’re fine. Why?’

  ‘You’ve looked at the figures?’

  ‘Some of them, certainly.’

  ‘Ghoul sightings inside the city walls in the past four days?’

  He’d picked one I actually noticed when Renprow pushed it across my desk. ‘Uh, three, then seven, twelve yesterday, another dozen or so came in this morning before I left after lunch.’

  ‘They’re scouting us,’ Garyus said.

  ‘What?’ I leaned forward and pulled his curtain aside. He looked like a monster in his shadowed den, an unwell monster, pale and beaded with sweat. ‘They’re scavengers, half-dead corpse-eaters following the riverbanks. There have been dead floating downstream for weeks – some army of Orlanth laying waste in Rhone.’ I wondered if Grandmother would be clogging rivers with dead Slovs before the month was out.

  ‘Have you mapped out the captures and the sightings?’ Garyus asked.

  ‘Well, no, but there’s no pattern to it. Except more by the river than anywhere else. But they’re everywhere.’ I tried to see it in my mind. Something about the picture I came up with worried me.

  ‘All over. Never the same area twice?’ Garyus looked grim.

  ‘Well, occasionally. But not often, no. Once the guard see them off they don’t come back. That’s a good thing … isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s what scouts do. Checking for weakness, gathering information to plan with.’

  ‘I should go,’ I said. ‘Had reports of corpse attacks in the outer city.’ It was the ones within the protection of the city walls that worried me most, but the recent messages spoke of a rash of attacks coming quite suddenly.

  I made to turn away but something glinting on the palanquin’s floor caught my eye. ‘What’s that?’ I leaned forward and answered my own question. ‘Pieces of mirror.’

  Garyus inclined his head. ‘The Lady is trying to open new eyes in Vermillion. She knows my sisters are coming for her – perhaps she’s desperate. I hope so. In any event, I advise against using any mirrors. A handsome fellow like you shouldn’t need to check his reflection – that’s a pastime for us ugly people in case we forget our appearance and get to thinking that the world will look well upon us.’

  ‘I gave up mirrors a while back.’ A shudder ran through me: too many glimpses of movement that shouldn’t be there, too many flickers that might have been blue. ‘Your sisters have left us to find the damn woman but what’s to stop her stepping out of someone’s looking-glass and murdering the lot of us while they’re gone? Not to mention that the ghoul-problem hasn’t gone away. Grandmother said that was a distraction to keep her here. Well she’s gone now … but we’re still finding bodies missing – dead ones and live ones. I don’t like it. Any of it.’

  Garyus pursed his lips. ‘I don’t like it either, Marshal, but it’s what we have. I’m sure my twin has left enchantments in place to close this city to the Lady Blue – at least from physical intrusion. She learned that lesson at a very young age. The rest of it is for us to take care of.’

  I sighed. I would have rather heard a comforting lie than the frightening truth. ‘Duty calls.’ I glanced down at the Black Courtyard, preparing to go. The yard stood clear now of all but a few mourners, the clerics set to watch the pyre burn down, and of course Garyus’s guard. The air above the embers rippled, reminding me of how Hell rippled when too many died at once and their souls came flooding through. I stared at the hot orange mound and through the heat shimmer I caught sight of a figure approaching. I watched, uncertain of what it was until it rounded the fire and I saw clear.

  ‘Dear God! Guards! Guards!’ I pointed a shaking hand at the thing walking calmly toward the stands. ‘It’s a … a…’ I had no idea.

  The six men at the base of the seating tiers looked up at me and, following the direction of my finger, they seemed to see the
flayed man for the first time. They recoiled in horror, but only for a moment, trained men these, hard men, Grandmother’s elite. As one they reached for their swords … then, as one, they let their arms fall, looked away. A moment later they were standing as they had been before, as if for all the world there wasn’t a hairless, skinless man in a black cloak walking calmly toward them.

  ‘What?’ I glanced back at Garyus in his palanquin. ‘What the hell? Garyus! Tell them! It’s possessed! A rag-a-maul’s had him!’

  Two of the guards looked up at me, frowning as if offended by my tone of voice.

  ‘Leave it be, Jalan. Luntar is a friend.’

  I moved quickly to the side of Garyus’s box and drew my sword. I would have hidden behind the thing but it had been pushed back against the wall of the building that the stand rested against. ‘That thing is a friend? It’s been fucking skinned!’ I looked down at the palace guard who were scanning the courtyard, wary for any threat to the steward. ‘And what the hell is wrong with your bodyguard?’

  ‘Burned. Not skinned.’ The black-cloaked man smiled up at me as he climbed the last few steps, his footprints wet behind him. ‘And the guards have merely forgotten what they saw. Memory is the key to any man. It’s all we are.’

  I kept my sword up as he closed the last couple of yards. I’d seen burned men before and dearly wished I hadn’t. Our visitor looked rather as if Father might have if he decided to clamber out of his coffin after the flames had taken hold good and hard.

  ‘Luntar,’ Garyus twitched a hand up in greeting. ‘Good to see you, old friend.’

  ‘Well met, Gholloth. And this would be your great-nephew, Jalan. A rare man.’

  I lowered my sword further than I wanted to and less than decorum demanded. ‘You know me?’

  Luntar smiled again. For a man who should be screaming in horrible agony he seemed remarkably cheerful. Burned skin cracked and wept as he spoke. ‘I know far less of you than I know of almost any man. Which makes you a rarity. Your future is too twisted with that of Edris Dean to be seen clearly.’

  I frowned. The future-sworn don’t see me – that’s what Edris Dean had said about himself. The fact he loomed in my future as well as my past did not make me feel any better. I might want him dead but I didn’t want to be the one tasked with the job.

  ‘My condolences for the loss of your father, Prince Jalan.’ Luntar spoke into the silence where my reply should have been. ‘I met him once. A good man. The loss of your mother changed him.’

  ‘I…’ I swallowed and coughed. ‘My thanks.’

  ‘To what do we owe the honour, Luntar?’ Garyus asked.

  ‘You know me, Gholloth. Always chasing probabilities and possibilities. Or chased by them.’

  Luntar looked out across the rooftops at the pale sky. The seared flesh glistened across his skull and I took a step back, or would have if I hadn’t fetched up against the wall, banging my head. ‘Trouble is coming.’ Spoken to the heavens.

  ‘Don’t need a future-sworn to see that.’ I rubbed the back of my head. ‘Trouble’s always coming.’

  ‘There’s to be an attack? Here?’ Garyus asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Luntar faced us again. ‘But it runs far deeper than that. Your sisters have gone to stop Mora Shival, but it will not be enough. The world is broken, not just this empire, not just these lands, but the world itself, from mountain root to sky and out beyond. The armies of the dead are just the start of it.’

  I puzzled over ‘Mora Shival’ then remembered that in Grandmother’s memories it had been Lady Shival with the sapphire headdress that had come to kill the elder Gholloth. Somewhere after that she had become the Blue Lady.

  ‘How long do we have?’ Garyus again.

  ‘Months.’

  ‘Months?’ I asked. ‘Until the attack?’ Grandmother would be back by then and it could be her problem.

  ‘The attack will be very soon. Perhaps it has already started. It will be months until the end.’

  ‘Of?’ I spread my palms in query.

  Luntar echoed my gesture then spread his arms to encompass the palace and the sky. ‘Everything.’

  I laughed.

  He stared at me.

  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.’

  11

  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 pe
ople, 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.

  Less than a week. Suddenly the perimeter reports seemed far more important.

  ‘Trouble,’ I said. ‘Some graveyards we hadn’t got to have emptied themselves. Occupants missing. A dozen corpse attacks reported. Two families … missing.’ I winced. The guard had led me to one house, close to the North Road. Blood on the floor, on the walls, broken furniture. Flies everywhere. No occupants. Except a baby in its crib. Or rather, the remains of one. ‘The neighbours saw nothing.’ That had been hard to imagine with the houses built shoulder to shoulder. I’d set the guard knocking on doors and hurried back to the palace to meet Luntar. Garyus had wanted the privacy of the throne room to conclude our discussion and Luntar had other people to see before he left. He’d mentioned Dr Taproot as one of those, though I hadn’t heard the circus had come to town. ‘I need to get back and oversee a series of sweeps.’ I turned back to face the throne room, and stopped in momentary surprise.

  ‘I won’t keep you long.’ Luntar stood before us, we two his only witnesses. He slipped from the memory of every other person even as they saw him. An invisibility of a kind. Whether there was something in the Kendeth blood that resisted the trick, or whether he simply chose to allow us to remember him, he didn’t say, though even in the minute reporting to the steward with my back to Luntar I had forgotten that he was there.