Emperor of Thorns

by Mark Lawrence

  At last, as the assassin reached the internal door to the east tower, we found a guard who hadn’t abandoned his post. Sir Graeham, knight of my table, asleep on his feet, held upright by a combination of plate armour, a halberd, and the wall. Pale hands positioned the long knife at the gap between gorget and shoulderplate. The assassin set the heel of his palm over his knife’s bone hilt, positioned so a sharp blow would puncture both leather and chainmail, and find the jugular beneath. He paused, perhaps sharing my thought that the knight might create quite a clatter if he fell. We held, close enough that I could draw Sir Graeham’s ripe stink in with each breath. The wind howled and I drove the knife home. Its hilt stung the hand that wasn’t mine, the business end stung Sir Graeham worse, and he fell, twitching. His weight pulled him from the knife.

  Again the assassin cleaned his blade. This time on the knight’s red cloak, smearing it with a brighter shade. Fastidious, this one.

  He found the key on Graeham’s belt and unlocked the oak door, iron-bound and polished by the touch of hands. Old as the door was, the archway held more years. My uncle’s scrolls spoke of a time when the Haunt was nothing but the east tower, a single watchtower set on the mountain’s shoulder with a military camp about its base. And even those men, who fought the tribes of Or and forged a stronghold in the Highlands, did not build the tower. There is writing on that arch, but time has forgotten even the name of the script. Its meaning has passed beyond knowing.

  The assassin stepped beneath the archway and beneath the runes deep-set upon the keystone. Pain shot through me, thorns found my flesh, hooking through skin and blood in a manner that promised no easy release, like the barbed arrow that must be dug free, or the lock-hound that needs killing before the muscles and tendons along its jaw can be sliced and its teeth pried from the bone. It hurt, but I found my freedom, torn from the body that had held me. He walked on without pause and I staggered in his wake, following as he mounted the stair. Across the back of his black cloak a cross had been sewn in white silk. A holy cross.

  I ran at him, but passed through as if I were the ghost, though in truth it was me that shivered at the contact. Lamp light offered me his face as I turned, just for a moment before he walked through me and left me standing on the steps. The man held no colour, his face the same pale, drowned hue as his hands, hair oiled to the scalp, the iris of his eyes matching the ivory of the whites. He bore a cross embroidered in white silk across the front of his tunic to echo the one on his back. A papal assassin then. Only the Vatican sends assassins out into the world bearing a return address. The rest of us would rather not be caught using such agents. The papal assassin however is merely an extension of the Pope’s infallibility – how can there be shame in executing the word of God? Why would such men cloak themselves in anonymity?

  Sprawled in an alcove off the stairwell, Brother Emmer lay dead to the world. The assassin knelt and applied his knife to make sure it was a permanent state of affairs. Emmer had shown little interest in women on the road and had seemed a good choice to watch over my queen. I watched the Pope’s man climb the stairs until the turn of the tower took him from view. Emmer’s blood washed down, step by step, in crimson falls.

  I never fought Katherine, never tried to escape her illusions, but that didn’t mean I had to cooperate. Somehow I had broken free of the assassin and I had no reason to watch what else he might do. Murder my queen, no doubt. Miana would be sleeping in the chamber at the top of the stairs if Katherine kept to the castle plan she had mined from my memories. Should I follow like a fool and watch Miana’s throat slit? See her thrash in her blood with my child dying inside her?

  I stood in the darkness with just the echoes of lamplight from beyond the winding of the stair above and below.

  ‘Truly? You think you can show me anything that would hurt me?’ I spoke to the air. ‘You’ve walked my rememberings.’ I let her wander where she pleased when she came with her nightmares. I thought perhaps that daring the long corridors of my memory was more torment to her than her punishments were to me. Even with the key to each of my doors in her hand I knew there were places in me she didn’t go. Who in their right mind would?

  ‘Let’s play this game, Princess, all the way through. Let’s discover if you find the end too bitter.’

  I ran up the stairs, the contacts between foot and stone were light and without effort, as if only in the assassin’s flesh could I properly touch this dream. I caught him within moments, passed him and won the race to the top.

  Marten waited there, crouched before the queen’s door, his sword and shield on the floor, his eyes bloodshot and wild. Sweat held dark hair to his brow and ran down the straining tendons of his neck. In one fist a dagger, making constant jabs into his open palm. His breath came in short gasps and blood brimmed crimson from the cup of his hand.

  ‘Fight it,’ I told him. Despite my resolve I found myself drawn in by his struggle to stay awake and guard Miana.

  The assassin came into view, my view, not Marten’s. He stopped, sniffed the air without sound, and cocked his head to catch the faint gasp of Marten’s pain. Whilst he paused I dived into him, determined to settle around his bones, clinging to anything tangible. A moment of blind agony and I stared once more out of his eyes. I tasted blood. He had shared the hurt of reunion with me and although he hadn’t cried out, a sharp intake of breath had passed his lips. Perhaps it would be enough to warn Marten.

  The Pope’s man reached into his robe, replacing the long bone-handled blade and drawing forth two short and heavy daggers, cruciform and weighted for throwing. He moved very fast, diving into Marten’s line of sight whilst at the same time releasing the first of his knives, just a flick of the wrist but imparting lethal force.

  Marten launched himself almost in the instant we faced him, slowed for a heartbeat perhaps by the weight of sleep he denied. The assassin’s dagger hit somewhere between neck and belly – I heard chain links snap. He passed us with a roar and the assassin’s foot lashed out, catching Marten’s chin, propelling him into the curved wall. Momentum carried him feet over head over feet, clattering down the stairs. We hesitated, as if unsure whether to pursue and check if any bones remained unbroken. The hot wetness below our knee convinced the assassin otherwise. Somehow Marten had sliced the assassin as he passed. The Pope’s man hobbled on toward the door, hissing at the pain now spreading from the cut Marten had left on us. He paused to tie a bandage, a silk sash from an inner pocket, pulled it tight, then advanced up the steps.

  Any key had clattered down the stairs with Marten and the Pope’s man took out his picks once more to work the lock. It took longer than before, the queen’s door boasted a tricky mechanism perhaps as old as the tower. Before it yielded to our patient work the flagstones were pooled with the assassin’s blood, red as any man’s despite the pallor of his skin.

  We stood, and I felt his weakness – blood loss and something else – he strained some muscle I didn’t share, but I knew the effort wearied him. Perhaps the all-encompassing sleep had cost him dear.

  The door opened without sound. He took the lamp from its hook where Marten had crouched and stepped in. The strength of his imaginings began to reach me as at last his excitement mounted. I saw the pictures rising in his mind. All of a sudden, dream or no dream, I wanted him to fail. I didn’t want him to slice Miana open. I had no wish to see the red ruin of my unborn child drawn from her. The fear surprised me, raw and basic, and I knew it to be my own, not some sharing with Katherine. I wondered if it might be an echo of what Coddin warned I would feel for my son or daughter when I first saw them, held them. If that were true then I had my first inkling of how dangerous the bond might be.

  On the dresser by the bed a glimmer from the silver chain I gave Miana on her name day. Under the covers a mounded form caught in shadows, wife and child, soft in sleep.

  ‘Wake up.’ As if saying it would make it happen. ‘Wake up.’ All my will and not even a tremble of it on his lips.

  Cold ce
rtainty gripped me by the throat. This was real. This was now. I slept in my bed in a tent, Miana slept in hers miles from me, and a pale death approached her.

  ‘Katherine!’ I shouted her name inside his head. ‘Don’t do this!’

  He stepped toward the bed, the second of his throwing knives raised and ready. Perhaps only the size of the lump beneath the covers prevented him from flinging the blade at it immediately. Miana could not be said to be a large woman, even with a baby straining to get out of her. It looked as though she had company in there. I might even have thought it, but for Marten at the door.

  Another step, his injured leg numb and cold now, his lips muttering some spell in silence, as if his magics mirrored his unsteady gait and needed support. I had no warning, my arm – his arm – drew back to throw. In that moment the covers fluttered, I heard a muted ‘choom’ and a fist hit my side, hard enough to throw me back, spinning twice before slamming into the wall. I slid to the floor, legs stretched before me and looked down. Both pale hands covered my side, blood spurting between my fingers, pieces of flesh hanging.

  The covers lifted and Miana faced me, crouched around the black mass of the Nuban’s crossbow, eyes wide and fierce above it.

  My right hand found the bone handle of the longer knife. Spitting blood I crawled to my feet, the world rotating around me. I could see that no bolts remained in the crossbow. Inside the assassin I strained with every piece of my being to still his legs, to lay down the weapon. I think he felt it this time. He moved slowly, but keeping between Miana and her door. His eyes fell to her belly, taut beneath her nightgown.

  ‘Stop!’ I held to his arm with all my will, but still it crept forward.

  Miana looked angry rather than scared. Ready to do bloody murder.

  My hand started forward, lunging with the knife, aimed low, below the swing of Miana’s bow. I couldn’t stop it. The gleaming blade would pierce her womb, and slice, and in a welter of gore she would die. Our child with her.

  The assassin thrust, and a hand span from finding flesh our arm shuddered off course, all its power cut clean away by a blow that sheared through my shoulder. I twisted as I collapsed, the ironwork of the crossbow smashing into my face. Marten stood behind me, a devil clothed in blood, his snarl veiled in scarlet. My head hit the carpet, vision turning black. Their voices sounded far away.

  ‘My queen!’

  ‘I’m not hurt, Marten.’

  ‘I’m so sorry – I failed you – he passed me.’

  ‘I’m not hurt, Marten … A woman woke me in my dreams.’

  3

  ‘You’re quiet this morning, Jorg.’

  I crunched my bread: from the Haunt, a day old and slightly stale.

  ‘Still brooding over the chess?’ The smell of clove-spice as he came close. ‘I told you I’ve played since I was six.’

  The bread snapped and scattered crust as I broke it open. ‘Get Riccard in here will you?’

  Makin stood, downing his java, a cold and stinking brew the guards favour. He left without question: Makin could read people.

  Riccard followed him back in moments later, tramping mud over the floor hides, crumbs of his own breakfast in his yellow moustache.

  ‘Sire?’ He offered a bow, probably warned by Makin.

  ‘I want you to ride to the Haunt. Take an hour there. Speak to Chancellor Coddin and the queen. Catch us up as soon as you can with any report. If that report makes mention of a white-skinned man, bring the black coffer from my treasury, the one whose lid is inlaid with a silver eagle, and ten men to guard it. Coddin will arrange it.’

  Makin raised an eyebrow but came no closer to a question.

  I pulled the chessboard near and took an apple from the table. The apple sprayed when bitten and droplets of juice shone on the black and white squares. The pieces stood ready in their lines. I set a finger to the white queen, making a slow circle so she rolled around her base. Either it had been a false dream, Katherine designing better torments than of old, and Miana was fine, or it had been a true dream and Miana was fine.

  ‘Another game, Jorg?’ Makin asked. All around, from outside, the sounds of camp being struck.

  ‘No.’ The queen fell, toppling two pawns. ‘I’m past games.’

  4

  Five years earlier

  I took the Haunt and the Highland’s crown in my fourteenth year and bore its weight three months before I went once more to the road. I ranged north to the Heimrift and south to the Horse Coast, and approached fifteen in the Castle Morrow under the protection of Earl Hansa, my grandfather. And though it was his heavy horse that had drawn me there, and the promise of a strong ally in the Southlands, it was the secrets which lay beneath the castle that kept me. In a forgotten cellar one small corner of a lost world broke through into ours.

  ‘Come out come out wherever you are.’ I knocked the hilt of my dagger against the machine. In the cramped cellar it rang loud enough to hurt my ears.

  Still nothing. Just the flicker and buzz of the three still-working glow-bulbs overhead.

  ‘Come on, Grouch. You pop out to badger every visitor. You’re famed for it. And yet you hide from me?’

  I tapped metal to metal. A thoughtful tempo. Why would Fexler Brews hide from me?

  ‘I thought I was your favourite?’ I turned the Builders’ view-ring over in my hand. He hadn’t made me work very hard for it and I counted it a gift above any my father had ever given me.

  ‘It’s some kind of test?’ I asked. ‘You want something from me?’

  What would a Builder ghost want from me? What couldn’t he take, or make? Or ask for? If he wanted something, wouldn’t he ask?

  ‘You want something.’

  One of the glow-bulbs flickered, flared, and died.

  He needs something from me but can’t ask.

  I held the view-ring to my eye, and once again I saw the world – the whole world as viewed from outside, a jewel of blue and white hung in the blackness that holds the stars.

  He wanted me to see something.

  ‘Where are you, Fexler? Where are you hiding?’

  I moved to pull the view-ring away in disgust when a tiny point of light caught my eye. A single red dot in all that swirling blue. I pushed the ring tight against the bones of brow and cheek. ‘Where are you?’ And dialled the side of the ring so the world grew beneath me as though I fell into it. I steered and dialled, homing in on my prey, a constant red dot, drawing me to it now, faster and faster until the ring could show no more and the dot held steady above a barren hill in a range that stretched across badlands to the west of the Horse Coast.

  ‘You want me to go here?’ I asked.

  Silence. Another glow-bulb flared and died.

  I stood a moment in the trembling light of the last glow-bulb, shrugged and made my way up the narrow spiral of stairs toward the castle above.

  My grandfather’s map room is in a tall tower that overlooks the sea. The map scrolls are held in oiled leather tubes, a wax seal on each set with his sigil. Seven narrow windows admit the light, at least in the months when the storm shutters are not closed against the elements. A scribe is employed to tend the place, and spends his days there from dawn to dusk, ready to open the tubes for anyone authorized to view the contents, and to seal them away again when the work is done.

  ‘You’ve never thought to suggest a different room?’ I asked the scribe as the wind tried to steal the map for the twentieth time. I had been there an hour, chasing documents across the chamber, and was ready to commit murder. How Redmon hadn’t taken a crossbow and opened up on the folk below through his seven windows I didn’t know. I caught the map before it left the table and replaced the four paperweights it had shrugged off.

  ‘Good ventilation is essential for preserving the vellum,’ Redmon said. He kept his gaze on his feet, his quill turning over and over in his hand. I think he worried I might damage his charges in my temper. Had he known me he would have worried about his own health. He looked narrow enough to
fit through one of the windows.

  I located the hills I had seen through the view-ring, and found the general area of the particular hill where the red dot had sat so patiently. I had wondered if there might truly be a red light blazing on that hillside, so bright it could be seen from the dark vaults of heaven, but I reasoned that it had grown no brighter as my view closed in upon it and so it must have been some clever artifice, like a wax mark on a looking glass that seems to override your reflection.

  ‘And what does this signify?’ I asked, my finger on a symbol that covered the region. I felt pretty sure I knew. There were three similar symbols marked on the maps of Ancrath in my father’s library, covering the regions of Ill Shadow, Eastern Dark, and Kane’s Scar. But perhaps they served a different purpose in the southlands.

  Redmon stepped to the desk and leaned in. ‘Promised regions.’

  ‘Promised?’ I asked.

  ‘The half-life lands. Not a place to travel.’

  The symbols served the same purpose as they did in Ancrath. They warned of taints lingering from the Builders’ war, stains from their poisons, or shadows from the day of a thousand suns.

  ‘And the promise?’ I asked.

  ‘Noble Chen’s promise, of course.’ He looked surprised. ‘That when the half-life has spent itself these lands will be returned to man, to till and plough.’ Redmon pushed the wire-framed reading lenses further up his nose and returned to his ledgers at the big desk before the towering shelves of pigeonholes, each crammed with documents.