The Wheel of Osheim

by Mark Lawrence

  The unborn reared between us, its arms closing around me like the fingers of a hand. Somehow Snorri had seen the essence of his son within the unborn that attacked us inside the Black Fort’s vault. I hadn’t understood it then – how he saw his own inside that corrupt travesty of corpse flesh and wept to end it. I couldn’t see it now, but I knew my mother would have seen her daughter, and that was enough. It wasn’t my knife I plunged into the open heart of the unborn but the cardinal’s seal from that road far away, running along the Attar-Zagre border. And it wasn’t my faith that tore them apart, the child that never saw the world from the monster that was forged in Hell. It was the faith of the million and more, huddled in their churches, hiding from uneasy dreams in their beds, cowed by signs and portents, clinging to their god as the end of days drew near. That faith, that will, that belief, given power by the Wheel itself, split child from horror, and left the dead flesh shredded on the ground.

  I hadn’t felt the spikes pierce me. I didn’t feel the pain until I rolled and, finding myself on the floor, tried to rise. The blood flooded from puncture wounds in my shoulders and side, running hot down my back. I slumped to one side and lay there, watching. Edris faced me now, his face contorted with fury, the point of his own sword emerging from just beneath his ribs.

  I didn’t care about Edris any more. I looked around and saw them both, the lichkin and my nameless sister. She stood, a pale spirit, grown into the woman I had glimpsed when I cut her from the Hel-tree. She held both Mother and the Red Queen in her, beautiful, strong, undaunted. The lichkin, nerve-white and naked, hiding in the blind spot of my eyes, reached to clothe itself in my sister’s ghost. She took its finger in hers and wound its whole body swiftly into a ball, larger than a head, then compressed the ball until it grew smaller, smaller, the size of a fist, an eyeball, a pea … gone.

  Her image rippled like a reflection on water, changing, fading, shrinking, a younger woman, a child…

  ‘Don’t go.’ I tried to raise a hand to her.

  Edris loomed behind her, blood drenching the grey shirt across his abdomen. ‘Don’t go,’ he echoed me. ‘I’m sure I can find you another master.’ His fingers worked to spell runes into the air, weaving a new web of necromancy to snare her once again.

  My sister, a little child now, offered her tormentor a scowl I knew from the Red Queen’s face on the walls of Ameroth. She stamped her foot, punching down with both fists, and in an instant Edris was flung down, groaning alongside me in the fetid mess of the unborn remains. The groan became a snarl and he got to his knees, facing the faint traces that were all that was left of my sister, blocking them from my view. My sword, still jutted from between his shoulders, the hilt offered to me, swaying just out of reach.

  I didn’t have the strength to move. But I had the desire, and I moved anyway. With one last burst of energy, I yanked the sword free and took his head with a wild swing, more by luck than judgment.

  Edris knelt for a moment longer, blood spraying, then keeled over.

  Of my sister, there was no sign.

  It took me an age to reach the rear wall, crawling, inching through the filth whilst all around me the engines of the Builders screamed for the end of the world. Somehow my hand closed around the end of the key and I turned it to the middle, neutral, position.

  And there, at the end of all things, I hesitated. Let Loki’s key finish its work and I would be guaranteed safe passage into the new world that the Lady Blue had so desired. A god. The status I had always sought, all that and far more, delivered into my lap. No longer the superfluous princeling eking out a life at the margins of my grandmother’s court. Turn the key back to the left, and the great engines would shut down, the magic would leave this place, and with nothing to drive it forward, the Wheel that the Builders set turning, changing the balance between desire and the solid stuff of the world, would slow and eventually stop. Perhaps it might even turn back and return us to the lives men had known all those long years since some fool scattered us across the face of the Earth.

  Listen to the wise, though, and you would know they saw a doom postponed, not ended. The Silent Sister saw that same Wheel turn under the pressure of man’s greed for power and crack everything apart, pitching us minor mortals into fire and destruction. I could save myself now and end countless nations … or consign myself and all those people to the fire in a few short years. Beneath my hand the key smoked and all around me the engine whined and roared. The key still battled the lock, fighting for control, and the engine, without the fractal mirror to moderate its energies, ran wild.

  The many screens to either side of me continued to show their portions of a larger scene, as if they perforated the wall, revealing what was happening in the mind of the machine beyond.

  ‘I need—’

  ‘Men don’t know what they need.’ A figure turned, cutting across the first and unseen speaker. ‘They barely know what they want.’ He looked like a short man, though there was nothing to measure him against and the screens showed him larger than life. Neither young nor old, his dark hair standing as if in shock. He wore a coat of many colours. But as he turned it became a golden jacket sewn all over with innumerable pockets. In the next moment, the blacks of a Florentine modern, replete with three-tiered hat. Whatever he wore, he looked familiar. ‘Me? I’m just a jester in the hall where the world was made. I caper, I joke, I cut a jig. I’m of little importance.’

  ‘Professor…’ I saw the old man’s face there, traces of him behind Loki’s confidence and cunning.

  The god continued to address his unseen target. ‘Imagine though … if it were me that pulled the strings and made the gods dance. What if at the core, if you dug deep enough, uncovered every truth … what if at the heart of it all … there was a lie, like a worm at the centre of the apple, coiled like Oroborus, just as the secret of men hides coiled at the centre of each piece of you, no matter how fine you slice?’

  I clutched the key tight and the black ice of it slid beneath my grasp. The screens went dark.

  ‘Wouldn’t that be a fine joke now?’ Loki stood beside me.

  ‘W-what do you want?’ I tried to move away without releasing the key.

  ‘Me?’ Loki shrugged. ‘I’m finished when you break my key, and it will break when its job is done. Turn it left, turn it right. Make up your mind, Jalan.’

  ‘I … I don’t know.’ Sweat ran down me, my hand pale from loss of blood, trembling. ‘Was the Lady Blue telling the truth when she—’

  ‘Truth?’ Loki threw up his hands, fingers fluttering. ‘Lies are our foundation – we each start with a lie and build a life upon it. Lies are more durable than the truth, more mutable, able to change to meet requirements.’

  ‘I need the truth. You set me on this path with the truth when you showed me my mother die. The key didn’t drop me in the desert at random … it was all part of a plan. Meeting Jorg Ancrath, finding the steel to kill Maeres Allus. You were building me for this task, just as you built the key and sent it out in the world to gather strength.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Loki shrugged. ‘The facts are a liar’s best friends. So many truths are uncovered in the search for a plausible lie. Why not work with them?’ He turned to gesture at the chamber, a hall of wonders, strewn with death. ‘What a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive. The Great Scott wrote that, back when the moon wore a younger face.’ A sigh. As the darkness smoked about the key in my grasp Loki seemed to diminish, growing older, the light within him fading. ‘This was my first work and it is, I will admit, tangled. Where’s the coward that would not dare to fight for such a land? Another of the Great Scott’s lines – and here you are, my coward. Do you dare?’

  ‘But should I—’

  ‘I don’t care!’ Loki boomed across me, haggard now, and ill. ‘Only know that you don’t need the truth. The truth didn’t set you free. It was a lie. You didn’t see your mother die. You weren’t in the room. You weren’t even in Roma Hall that day.’

  �
�What?’

  ‘I lied to you.’

  ‘What…’

  ‘Hate, courage, fear … all lies. Don’t look for reasons. Do what you feel. Not what you feel to be right – just what you feel.’

  ‘I have the scar…’ My free hand moved toward my chest where Edris’s sword had caught me that day.

  ‘You did that climbing a fence.’

  ‘You lying bast—’

  ‘Yes, I know. Now hurry up could you? I’m falling apart here.’

  I looked back past the false god, a thing made real by the dreams of men, and saw, standing at the blood-smeared window to the other room, the hulking figure of my friend, only his eyes clearly visible where a hand had wiped the glass clean.

  I turned the key.

  33

  Garyus was buried as a king in the cathedral of Our Lady in Vermillion. The funeral procession wound from Victory Plaza in the palace out across the city, along the Corelli Line overlooking the river and down toward the Appan Gate. We had snow, the first snow to fall in Vermillion in eight years, as if the city had dressed for the occasion, covered up its scars and stains and dirt for just one day to see the old man laid to rest.

  I carried the coffin with my cousins, and Captain Renprow filled in the sixth space. The Red Queen appointed him to the honour for carrying Garyus up into the Blue Lady’s tower through magics no other soldier had survived, and for the heroics he displayed in getting my great-uncle to Blujen in the first place a week earlier, against Renprow’s own strong advice, it must be said.

  ‘For this, Marshal Renprow, we thank you. We thank you for carrying our brother.’

  ‘He carried me, your majesty.’ Renprow bowed. ‘And it was my honour.’

  ‘He carried us all.’ The Red Queen nodded and bowed her face. ‘For many years.’

  We set his coffin in a sepulchre of white marble within the cathedral, bound by magics that would secure him from any necromancy. I said the words over him in his resting place. I think I spoke them clearly and with meaning.

  ‘Be at peace, my brother.’ Grandmother laid her hand upon the cold stone, and beside her, seen by no one else but me, the Silent Sister put her own pale hand where her twin’s name was graven, and from her dark eye a single tear fell, sparkling.

  I came to see Snorri leave from the river docks. I had bought him a boat. A good one, I hoped. I called it The Martus. Darin left a child to carry his line and a wife who loved him. Martus needed something, and a boat to carry his name into the world was the best I could offer.

  Snorri stood at the wall beside the stone steps we had once run down, escaping Maeres Allus’s thugs. The wound on his face was healing, and his broken arm was hidden beneath a thick bearskin cloak fastened with a heavy golden clasp – a gift from the queen.

  ‘We have snow here! Why are you leaving?’ I spread my arms to encompass the unreal whiteness of Vermillion. Dockhands shivered around us in their too-thin coats as they loaded the last of his stores.

  ‘The North calls me, my friend. And this isn’t snow – this is a frosting. In the North we—’

  ‘Dance naked on such days. I know! I’ve seen it.’ I clapped a hand to his good arm. ‘I’ll allow it … but come back, you hear? As soon as you’ve had your fill of frostbite and bad food, come back and warm up again.’

  ‘I will.’ A grin, white teeth in the bristling blackness of his short beard.

  ‘Seriously. I mean it. Life will be too dull without all your nonsense.’ I had more to say but it left me, along with the air from my lungs, as Hennan shot up the steps and bundled into me. ‘Ouch! Careful! Wounded hero here!’ I put an arm round him and ruffled his red hair in the way that used to annoy me so much when my father did it to me. ‘Kara! Rescue me!’

  The völva came up from the boat at a more leisurely pace, casting an amused eye over the three of us. ‘The boat’s ready. The river too,’ she said.

  ‘Look after these idiots for me,’ I said. ‘The only thing Snorri knows in Trond are the docks and the Three Axes. And Hennan has never had the chance to appreciate the true horror of a Norseheim town.’

  ‘I’ll see they get there safe enough,’ she said. ‘After that I have things to do.’

  I shrugged and smiled. I didn’t know much about boats, but what I did know was that very often the people who stepped off them at the end of a long voyage were not the same people who had boarded them.

  And that was that. Snorri crushed the breath out of me with a one-armed hug, and the Seleen took them away, running west toward the sea.

  The weeks that followed saw the continuing rebuilding of the outer city, a labour that would keep the people of Red March busy for years to come. If we have years to come. But who knows how long they have? We stopped the engines driving us to destruction. All that turns the Wheel now is us. More slowly, yes, but the destination is the same. We purchased time and time is a wonderful thing. Me, I intend to waste it hand over fist until it’s time to panic again. And even then it will be someone else’s task to fix the problem. My adventuring days are over – a neat parcel of memories sealed with a bow and shoved into some dark corner of a cupboard to gather dust and never see the light of day again.

  Weeks later when the maid arrived at my rooms to stow away my laundered clothing, she came with Dr Taproot’s lens laid neatly on the top in its silver hoop.

  ‘It’s lucky they found that, your highness,’ she said, beaming beneath her curls. ‘A delicate thing like that could easily come to harm.’

  I was tempted to grind it to dust beneath my heel there and then. Loose ends warrant stamping on if they’re the kind that connect with people like Dr Taproot. In the end though I feared summoning trouble and settled for wrapping it up and finding a literal rather than metaphorical seldom-used cupboard with dark enough corners to hide the thing away. Then went off to the kitchens to demand a huge lunch with plenty of wine.

  Grandmother shook up the palace. Hertet, who miraculously survived the night of horror at Milano House, she sent into exile as permanent ambassador to the eastern czardoms. To quell any future manoeuvring over succession she officially named an heir. She even summoned me to a private session of court to discuss the matter. I backed her selection. Cousin Serah had showed in the siege that Grandmother’s blood ran deep in her. When at last the Red Queen met her end our people would shout ‘The Red Queen is dead! Long live the Red Queen!’

  Which just leaves me, here in the guest wing of the Inner Palace, watching from a high window as Barras Jon limps off to one or other of his duties. They found him alive on the morning when the Dead King broke his siege. He lay trapped amid a heap of broken corpses at the base of the city wall where we had fought together. His leg proved to be too badly shattered for a full recovery, but with the aid of a cane he gets about, overseeing his father’s affairs in Vermillion. Indeed, these days his business interests see him called hither and thither across the length and breadth of Red March. He says I saved him that day, and if I ever want anything from him I just have to ask. So really, my only crime is having forgotten to ask…

  ‘Get into bed, Jal. I told you he wasn’t coming up.’

  I turn back to my companion. She’s sitting up, wearing nothing but satin sheets and a smile. I echo the smile and unclasp my velvet robe. It drops into a purple heap behind me. I reach toward my head…

  ‘Leave the hat on,’ she says. ‘I like it … Cardinal Jalan.’

  ‘Oh my child,’ I say, pulling off my left boot. ‘You’re such a sinner.’ I kick off the other boot and start unbuttoning. ‘Time for some genuflexion. Let’s get ecumenical.’ I slide into bed beside her. I’ve been picking up the clerical language as the bishops desperately try to train me. I pull Lisa DeVeer to me. ‘Or even ecclesiastical.’ Neither of us know the definition of the word – but we both know what it means.

  And in the end neither the lies nor the truth matter.

  Just what we feel.

  *

  I’m a liar and a cheat and a coward,
but I will never, ever, rarely let a friend down.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to the good folk at HarperVoyager who have made this all happen and put the book in your hands.

  Special thanks to Jane Johnson for her continued support on all fronts and highly valued editing.

  Agnes Meszaros has also been of great help in bringing this book to fans of Jalan and Snorri. I’m indebted to her for kindness including beta reading, proofreading, wine and chocolate.

  Finally, let’s have another round of applause for my agent, Ian Drury, and the team at Sheil Land for all their sterling work.

  About the Author

  Mark Lawrence was born in Champagne-Urbanan, Illinois, to British parents but moved to the UK at the age of one. He went back to the US after taking a PhD in mathematics at Imperial College to work on a variety of research projects including the ‘Star Wars’ missile defence programme. Returning to the UK, he has worked mainly on image processing and decision/reasoning theory. He says he never had any ambition to be a writer so was very surprised when a half-hearted attempt to find an agent turned into a global publishing deal overnight. His first trilogy, The Broken Empire, has been universally acclaimed as a ground-breaking work of fantasy. Mark is married, with four children, and lives in Bristol.

  Follow Mark on:

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/‌MarkLawrenceBooks

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  The complete Broken Empire Trilogy is available to purchase here.

  Also by Mark Lawrence

  The Broken Empire

  Prince of Thorns

  King of Thorns

  Emperor of Thorns