‘The Dead King—’ Kai began.
‘The Dead King loves me too, I think,’ Jorg said, fingers closing on her flesh. ‘He has watched me for years. Sent his minions to raid my brother’s tomb.’ He turned to face Kai, very quick. ‘Do you know why?’
‘I—’
Jorg turned back, fixing Chella with his stare. ‘He doesn’t know. Do you?’
‘No.’
‘How frustrating for you.’ Jorg released her and leaned back on the bench. Her leg burned where his fingers had been. ‘Shall we carry on? My column is just ahead waiting to cross the Rhyme at the Honth bridge.’
Kai stamped for the carriage to proceed. ‘From what I’ve heard, I am surprised that you would choose to ride in the Lady Chella’s company, King Jorg.’
‘She’s been telling tales, has she?’ Jorg leaned forward again, with the air of a conspirator. ‘Truth be told— Wait, I don’t even know your name. I know you’re a man of the Isles, I have one of your country men in my carriage, a Merssy man, Gomst they call him. I’m pleased to see the Dead King has sent at least as many Brettans to Congression as I have. But your name?’
‘He’s Kai Summerson,’ Chella said, anxious to gain some control. ‘So why are you riding with us, Jorg?’
‘Can’t I just enjoy your company? Might I not be pining for my lady of the mire?’ Jorg cast a lascivious eye along the length of her. Despite herself Chella felt the blood rise in her cheeks. Ancrath noticed immediately and grinned all the wider. ‘You look … different, Chella. Older?’
She kept her lips sealed. They jolted another hundred yards before he spoke.
‘In truth? I could think of no easy way to kill you all. And so to keep my son safe from you I need to watch you. Closely. If that should prove impossible I would of course have to resort to killing you the hard way.’
‘Son?’ Chella found it hard to imagine, and imagination was something that had returned in strength when the necromancy faded from her. ‘You have a son?’
Jorg nodded. ‘Even so. Another William, to make his grandfather proud. Though I don’t know if Olidan of Ancrath lived long enough to be a grandfather?’
‘If he’s dead I know nothing of it.’ Time was she felt each death as ripples in a pond, and the King of Ancrath would have made quite a splash – now though, she might have new eyes for the living world, but she lay deaf to the deadlands. Jorg’s fault, of course. She said it to herself again, hoping to believe it. Jorg’s fault.
Jorg frowned, just for a moment, replacing it with the smile he wore in place of armour. ‘No matter.’
‘I’ve no designs on your son, Jorg,’ Chella said. It surprised her to find that she didn’t.
‘And you, Kai Summerson? Are you a child killer?’ Jorg asked.
‘No.’ A sharp reply, the offence written on his face. It seemed laughable that a necromancer should rail against such a suggestion, but then she remembered Kai had killed no one since she took him. When you learn the dark arts amid the corpse-hordes of the Isles murder is no longer a pre-requisite.
‘Me, I have taken the lives of children, Kai. Baby boy, small girl, it means little. The lives of men even less. Do not cross me.’ Careless words scattered like broken glass for the Brettan to pick a path through. Chella came to Kai’s aid before he cut himself.
‘Does your son make you happy, Jorg?’ The question felt important. Jorg Ancrath with a baby boy. Chella tried to picture him with the infant in his arms.
Jorg flashed a dark look her way. He bowed his head, shielded by the hair that swept about his face, and for the longest time she thought he would not reply.
‘There are no happy endings for such as us, Chella. No redemption. Not with our sins. Any joy is borrowed – laughter shared on the road, and left behind.’ He turned to Kai. ‘I have killed children, Kai Summerson. In such company you will too.’ Something familiar lay in his voice, in the framing of his words. She could almost taste it.
Returning his gaze to Chella Jorg watched her face awhile, sorrow in his own. ‘We have both walked black paths, lady. Don’t think that mine leads back into the light. Of all those that tried to guide me, of my father, of the whispers from the thorn bush, of Corion’s evil council, the darkest voice was ever mine.’
And in a moment of recognition Chella knew who the Dead King was.
38
When Makin reported the Isles’ contingent catching up our own golden host I had known Chella would be amongst their number. Known it blood to bone, without evidence or reason. And I left our carriage, my wife, my child, my tantalizing aunt, with more swiftness than was seemly, and with less trepidation than when I went to my father’s carriage, though this one might hold the Dead King himself. I closed the door on them all, on all my weaknesses. Despite my tempering of years some foolish part of me still reached for the happiness of family, the redemption love might bring. Broken hopes that would not serve me. I closed the door on them and rode toward what I knew best – toward the damned. My past lay black, the future burned, and in the thin slice between, the world expected me to be a father, to hold a son, to save him, save them all? Too much to ask of a man so dark with sin. Too much to ask of any man perhaps.
The Dead King’s carriage, whilst not so grand as Lord Holland’s, had nothing funereal about it. Even the presence of two necromancers hadn’t tainted the atmosphere. In fact I didn’t know for sure if Kai Summerson practised the arts of reanimation: he seemed too young, too full of life. And Chella herself had changed. Beyond a doubt. In past encounters she had burned with an unholy joy, so fierce that its light became an after-image on the memory, obscuring truth. In the swamps and caverns an ambiguity of the flesh made her all things to all men, or at least to this one, ripe with the darkest juice. Now it seemed that a stranger sat opposite me, more old, more pale, still with a beauty to her, hair very black, high and delicate angles to her face, an elegance not seen before, her eyes dark with secrets and in unguarded moments becoming wounds.
‘I still mean to kill you,’ I said, in part to pass the time as we rumbled through the streets of Honth.
She shrugged, less easy in her indifference than of old. ‘The Nuban forgave me. You should too.’
That made me start. ‘He did not!’ But he probably did. The Nuban never held grudges – said he had enough to carry and a long way to go.
‘So, tell me about the Dead King.’ I asked Kai and he shuddered at the words. Just for a moment, quickly suppressed.
The Brettan looked out of the window before he answered, as if seeking the reassurance of daylight, comfort in the passing of narrow homes in plaster and thatch, each stuffed with lives, mother, father, squalling brats, toothless elders, bristling with argument and laughter, every flea hopping.
‘The Dead King is the future, King Jorg. He closed his hand around the Drowned Isles and soon he’ll reach out for the world. He rules in the deadlands, and we all will spend longer dead than we do living.’
‘But who is he, Chella? What is he? Why the interest in Ancrath?’ She knew something. Perhaps she would tell me in the hope it would make me suffer.
‘Ancrath is the gateway to the continent, Jorg. You’re a clever boy, you should know that.’
‘Why me?’ I asked.
‘You make a lot of people take notice. Destroying mountains, holding huge armies at your gates. All very grand. And of course the Dead King knows you have your eye on Ancrath. It’s bad enough that your father proves so stubborn in his resistance, to have the son there in his place would be worse still, maybe?’
‘Hmmm.’ It sounded plausible, but I didn’t believe her. ‘And surely this Dead King can’t think to win friends at Congression? He expects diplomacy? Negotiations with dead things crawled from slime and dust?’
Chella smiled to herself, a gentle thing that made her pretty. ‘There are worse monsters at the emperor’s court, Jorg. The Queen of Red is on the road to Congression. The Silent Sister with her, to advise, and Luntar out of Thar with them. You’ve
met Luntar I understand?’
‘Just once.’ I had no memory of him, but we had met. He had given me that copper box, and filled it. ‘They might be monsters, perhaps worse than me, but they are born of women, they live, they will die. Tell me, where has this Dead King come from? Don’t the dry-lands slope ever down? Don’t they reach hell? Has he escaped Lucifer and climbed from the abyss?’
‘He’s no demon.’ Chella made a slow shake of her head, as if it might have been better to have a risen demon among us. ‘And what happens here, in the mud and dirt of this world, matters very much to him. Heaven, hell, and earth, three that are one – there can be no change above or below that isn’t mirrored here. This world, where our lives are spent, is both a lock and a lever. That is what the Dead King says.’
‘And doesn’t the Devil object to this vagrant camping on his very doorstep? Stealing what is his?’ It seemed absurd to be debating the politics of hell, but I had reached into the dead-lands with my own hands, tasted the air, and I knew them to be a path to Lucifer’s door.
‘The Dead King plans to break open the gates of heaven,’ Kai said. ‘You think that he cares what else may come?’
‘Everything is changing, Jorg.’ Chella bowed her head. ‘Everything.’
‘You still haven’t told me where he came from, this messiah of yours. Why don’t the ancients speak of him? In what books is he recorded?’ I asked, still hoping for grains of truth in her lies and madness. ‘How old is he?’
‘Young, Jorg. Very young. Younger than you.’
39
Chella’s Story
The bridge at Tyrol spanned the Danoob in seventeen arches, a broad carriageway riding across stone pillars. The great bridge back at Honth had leaped the Rhyme in one breath-taking arc, but Chella liked the Tyrol bridge better. She could imagine it being built, see in her mind’s eye the men who laboured here.
‘How does the river look to you, Chella?’ Jorg watched close for her answer.
‘Brown and churning.’ She reported it faithfully. ‘What do you see, Kai?’
Kai half stood, peering through the window grille, swaying with the motion of the carriage. ‘Brown.’
‘Are there no lovers amongst us?’ Jorg asked. ‘The legend that the waters look blue to those in love is older than this bridge.’
‘The river is brown. Shit brown. It’s a matter of silt and drainage and the sewers of Tyrol, not of the sick-making fantasies that people want to wrap their fucking in.’ Chella saw no reason to keep the sourness to herself.
‘Not so,’ Jorg said. ‘If the right man loved the right woman he could make that river run blue.’
‘Water-sworn.’ Kai sat back into the shadows, nodding.
‘Meh.’ Jorg shook his head. ‘All this swearing. All these narrow paths. A man can reach into anything and turn it to his cause. It’s not want, or desire, just certainty. Only be assured that whatever you reach into will reach into you in turn.’
He set his boots across the gap between seats, resting between Kai and Chella. ‘Did you ever love, Kai? Was there a girl that would turn the waters blue for you?’
Kai opened his mouth then bit back on the answer. He started forward, then slumped. ‘No.’
‘Love.’ Jorg smiled. ‘Now there’s something that will reach back into you.’
The carriage rumbled from the bridge down onto the north bank where the roads lay better tended.
‘Perhaps you should go back to your own carriage, Jorg, to your queen, and see if you like the view from there any better.’ Chella found herself not wanting him to leave, but tormenting him was all she knew. For a moment she saw the needle she had used to stick Kai, and felt it sliding into flesh again.
He pulled in his feet and leaned in toward her, close, hand resting once more upon her thigh. ‘What is it you’re hoping to achieve at Congression, Chella? The Dead King can’t think to win any converts, surely? I’m not even certain that Master Summerson here is a proper convert. So what is the point?’
‘The point is that we have a right to attend and that the Dead King wishes us to. Either should be enough for you, Jorg of Ancrath.’ Chella winced at the grip on her leg. Life and pain walked hand in hand, neither to her liking.
He narrowed his eyes – how many had seen that look and then nothing else ever again? – and moved closer, his breath tickling across her cheek. ‘You’re here to show us the human face of the dead-tide? To put Congression at its ease? Flatter old kings, a pretty boy to flirt with their queens and princesses?’
‘No.’ Anger bubbled up in her, hot under the coolness of his breath – her hands made claws. ‘We’re here with trickery and treachery and deceit and murder, just like you, Jorg of Ancrath, what else can broken things like us bring to the world?’
‘Renar.’
‘What?’ Her thigh burned, again, where he touched her, again.
‘Jorg of Renar.’
‘Doesn’t it gall you to take his name, the one who murdered little William? Sweet mother Rowan?’
‘Better than to take my father’s name.’
‘Instead you wear his brother’s name? A man you keep in dark torment? Don’t snarl so, I hear the guard speak of it, of how you murdered Harran, and another good man to get to the son.’
He leaned in close. ‘Maybe I keep the name to remind me of the colour of my soul.’ His breath out, her breath in. She tasted cinnamon.
‘Was that all I needed to seduce you, Jorg? To just be a touch less damned?’
He turned from her, staring at Kai in his shadowed corner. ‘Get out.’
And he did, a quick unwelcome flash of daylight, cold and drear, and Kai was gone.
‘I’m still going to kill you,’ Jorg said, very close.
Chella closed his mouth with hers.
She ran her fingers across his shoulders, plunged her hands down then up under the pleating of his road-tunic, across the heat and hardness of muscle laid over his back, stippled by old scars, the slice of a heavy blade, nicks and cuts, a hundred thorn wounds. He moved over her, tall, heavy, the dark wave of his hair falling about them, the scrape of his burned face as his mouth found the hollow of her neck.
Something hot and wet and vital ran through her, a sudden flood that took her breath and lifted her. The life-force she’d been resisting, rejecting, washed away all resistance, implacable as spring. She tore at him, angry, fierce, wanting. He lifted her, without pause or effort, slamming her back against the padded wall. Some small fragment of her worried that the driver might think it the sign to stop, and the guard would gather round. Jorg surged against her and all other voices quieted. His desire woke an answer in her, the need bled from every line of him, spoke in the ragged breaths he drew.
Their bodies came together in a savage recognition of flesh, her limbs strained under the weight of him, hand splayed one second, clenched the next, cushions shredded. Outside, the uneasy snort of horses, the whickering of mares, the stamp of stallions reacting to stray energies, to the scent of their lust. Jorg slammed her against the wall once more, harder, and the carriage lurched forward, the team breaking into a trot despite the driver’s cries. Black skirts gathered around her hips.
Jorg entered her, brutal, quick, wanted – an ungentle coupling, both of them torn by rough need. Chella rose to meet him, all her strength locked against him, riding and ridden, no comfort offered or given. They coupled like wild cats, instinctual aggression kept at bay, a truce imposed by some deeper, older, imperative, but unable to stop the violence bubbling over, ready to part squalling at the moment of release.
‘Enough!’ Jorg threw her off him and lurched backward onto the opposite bench, beyond the reach of her nails, panting, blood at the corner of his mouth.
‘I— I’ll say when it’s enough, King of Renar.’ She spat the words between her gasps. She wanted more, but it might kill her. Every inch of her tingled, burned with a fire of new-woken life. Jorg had been the key to turn the lock. Perhaps any man might have served, but it seeme
d right that it had been him.
Jorg pushed back sweat-plastered hair and tied up his trews, the belt too broken to hold. ‘I’m far from sure you can even stand, madam.’ The flash of a grin, full of mischief. He looked very young in that moment.
‘So that’s how diplomacy is conducted at Congression?’ she asked, heart still thumping, lying back in warmth and wetness.
‘When we get there we’ll see.’ Jorg scooped some stray buttons from the floor and set a hand to the door. ‘And when I’m crowned we’ll have our last kiss.’
As if she’d ever bend the knee and kiss his hand. The arrogance of it made her snarl.
‘Back to your lady love now, Jorg?’ Chella set a smile on her lips but it didn’t fit well.
‘She’s too good for the likes of me, Chella. I’m soiled goods, past repair. I belong with our kind.’ He flashed that smile again and pushed out the door. ‘Come near my son and I’ll kill you, Chella.’ And he was gone.
40
I kept Brath to a gentle trot, passing the guard of the Drowned Isles delegation and drawing ever closer to the golden army surrounding the delegations of Ancrath and Renar. Katherine with Father’s two votes, me with my seven.
Katherine would know. Somehow she would know, even if she didn’t trespass in my dreams she’d smell Chella on me. Miana would just shake her head in that way that makes her look like someone’s mother rather than the child she is. ‘Never tell me, never let me be told.’ That’s all she ever asked of me. And I’ve held to it as far as I know. Clearly, she deserved better, but it would require a better man to give it.
I found a foolish smile on my lips and wiped it away. My tongue ached and I had lines of fire across my back. Nail wounds always hurt more than the shallow cut of a blade. Taking Chella had been ill advised, but my whole life has been a series of dangerous choices wrestled around to better outcomes. Not that it had been a choice, not truly. There are times when we realize we’re just passengers, all our intellect and pontification, carried around in meat and bones that knows what it wants. When flesh meets fire it wants to pull back and does so whatever you might have to say about it. There can be times, when man meets woman, that the same forces work in reverse.
Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3) Page 31
