Published at 29th of December 2023 11:04 am

Chapter 40

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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.

Makin rode with me from the rear of our column to Holland’s carriage.

‘You’re leaving them alone to plot now?’ He had a suspicious look on him, as though he knew I’d been up to something.

‘A judgment call,’ I said. ‘I don’t judge they’ll be calling on us. And if they do …’

‘Missing our company, were you?’ Makin pulled alongside, shoulder to shoulder, putting the faint scent of clove-spice in the air. It worried me he took so much, blunting the true Makin, but I could hardly counsel sense. Red Kent joined us as we moved further up the column. ‘Missing us?’ he echoed Makin.

‘Missing you? You remember Chella from the leucrota halls, from the swamp. How long would you like to ride in her carriage?’

Both men rode in silence for a minute, staring out across the fields. Which part of those encounters they might have been visualizing I couldn’t say. Holland’s carriage came into view as we rounded a long bend.

‘Just long enough,’ Makin said, answering my forgotten question. ‘I’d ride with her long enough.’

Kent reached out and tugged up the collar of my road-tunic, not something he’d done since I was ten, and certainly not since I was king. ‘Mosquito bite,’ he rasped in that burned voice of his, and touched his neck. ‘Big one from the looks of it, like what we had us back in the Cantanlona marsh.’

I climbed to the carriage footplate from Brath’s saddle without having the driver stop.

‘Did you miss me, Father Gomst?’ I slammed the door behind and threw myself between Katherine and Miana, one scrambling to get her book out of the way, the other hauling my son clear.

‘Did Orrin ever tell you about the day we met on the road, Katherine?’ I didn’t give the good bishop a chance to reply.

She closed her book, some small and battered tome in red leather. ‘No.’

‘Hmm. And there was me thinking I’d made an impression.’

‘But Egan did, several times. And Egan was a man of few words,’ she said. Behind me, William started to fuss for the breast.

‘He said Orrin was a fool for toying with you, for letting you live, said he would have killed you in three heartbeats.’

‘Well I was only fourteen,’ I said. ‘In the end I bested him in less than three heartbeats. In any case, I had a friend with me that day who would have roasted Orrin in his armour by way of a victory prize. So once again, even with hindsight, Orrin was the wisest man there.’

As the carriage rumbled on I took the view-ring out and used it with practised ease to zero in on the Tall Castle. Years of such watching had revealed little about my father’s plans save to tell me they hadn’t been written in letters six foot tall and left upon the roof. Now, I saw palls of smoke trailing down across the city. Even from heaven’s heights the black work of the fires could be seen, stamped across the Tall Castle, across the streets of Crath. It seemed the Dead King was burning my past just as the Builders planned to burn our future. If his dark flood turned into a tide the Builders would end us all before such magics tore the world open.

Closer study found black sails on the Sane, columns marching along both shores. I followed their progress. The Dead King’s legions had reached through Gelleth already. Forcing their pace night and day there existed a possibility that they might catch us before the gates of Vyene. Estimating the size of the horde proved difficult, strung out and loose along the banks as it was, tens of thousands perhaps. More might join with it along the way. Even so. Dead men against heavy horse and city walls? It seemed a rash move.

‘What do you see?’ Gomst asked as I made my count.

‘Trouble.’

The thought of the dead things marching, despoiling the garden lands of Ancrath – it put a thin blade between my ribs and let it twist. I wondered if even the graves at Perechaise had yielded their dead. I might not have stood to keep the Dead King’s horde from the Tall Castle but in a different time, beside the girl-who-waits-for-spring and the grave in which I buried Justice, I would have made such a stand.

I leaned back, my eye aching after two hours and more of staring through the ring. Miana slept, our child on her chest. I thought of my father, seated in his throne, iron diadem upon his head. The old bastard was dead? I didn’t know what to do with that. It didn’t fit, no matter how I turned it. He had been mine to kill, mine to end. Fate had been drawing me to that moment all these years … I rubbed my sore eye, slumped forward, elbows on knees, chin on knuckles. Father couldn’t be dead. I set the matter aside, to chew upon when it seemed more palatable.

Across the carriage Bishop Gomst dozed, grey hair straying, mouth ajar. Osser Gant watched me though, silent and with a bright eye. Makin’s chancellor, brought for his advice, yet holding his tongue.

I thought then of Coddin, my chancellor rotting back in the Haunt, of Fexler Brews lost in his machines, both of them with their talk of setting the world to rights, Coddin wanting me to break the power of the hidden hands, Fexler’s ambition grander still, to turn some non-existent wheel and return us to how things were meant to be, to make the world once more as it was given to us.

Two Ancraths, the wise had said, two to undo all the magic, to turn Fexler’s wheel! A sour smile quirked my lips. They’d better pray, both of them, Coddin and Fexler, the dying man and the ghost, pray that prophecy meant nothing, for there would be just the one Ancrath in Vyene and he’d brought with him no clue as to how to repair a broken empire, let alone a broken reality.

More rode on this matter than the power and influence of a few sorcerers, more than the enchantments of Sageous’s peers, men like Corion and Luntar who played their games with lives. Fexler’s third way rested upon the restoration of what had been normality. Michael and his brotherhood saw flesh as a disease that could be burned out, thereby ceasing the rotation of that wheel, stopping the world from cracking open. Fexler alone had entertained larger thoughts: he alone had believed we might turn back what had been done and spare mankind from a second coming of the fire that he had once brought down upon us.

In truth I took my firstborn to the place where the Builders would start their fire. If Fexler proved as deluded as Michael had suggested – if he couldn’t change the nature of existence – Vyene would burn and new suns would rise on man’s last day.

We narrowed the distance to Vyene and the weather closed around us, late autumn chill, river fog refusing the sun, persistent rain, cold and sapping the spirits, making mud of the land. The countryside grew more dour with each mile that passed beneath our hooves. We found whole villages abandoned, reviving memories of Gottering and filling every treeline with threat. The guard discovered fresh graves disinterred, late crops flattened in the field, apples rotting on the bough.

Riders passed us, their horses blown and ragged, the men not much better. All of them bore tales of the Dead King’s forces, of their strike through Ancrath, their advance into Gelleth, and now the threat to Attar, cutting a dark wedge through empire along the path we had taken only days before.

It might be said that destruction and disaster have always dogged my heels, but never before had that curse been so manifest. I travelled to Vyene and hell followed in my wake.

We stopped that night in the town of Allenhaure and ate at table within a great beer hall that could hold close on three hundred of the Gilden Guard. In Allenhaure at least, on the very doorstep of the empire’s heartland, neither winter nor the Dead King’s blight had yet sunk their teeth. The locals brought huge haunches of roast meat on wooden platters, lamb in a crust of garlic, herb, and hazelnut, beef unadorned and bleeding. Beer too, blonde with a thick white head, in tankards built like barrels of wooden stays bound by hoops, and in glass steins for the high table. They seemed genuinely pleased to see us, a festival atmosphere throughout. I wondered though if it were merely that if they feted us the guard might choose to restock provisions at the next town.

The beer had a clean taste, sharp, and I drank too much of it, perhaps to dim the images from Chella’s carriage, playing again and again through my mind, making me feel at once both sullied and hungry for more. Late on in the evening I leaned across Miana and took our son from the crib at her side.

‘Don’t wake him, Jorg!’

‘Oh shush, I’m taking him for a walk. He’ll like it.’ To his credit William, still looking only half-human as new babies are wont to look, lay limp in sleep while I manhandled him to my chest, and seemed impervious to disturbance of any kind. A cold tremor ran through me as I remembered Degran lying in my hands, lifeless, a ragdoll. I bit down on the memory, refusing to let it cripple me each time I held my boy. The death burned out of my touch the day I broke the siege at the Haunt.

‘At least wrap him up warm, take the—’

‘Shush, woman.’ For such a tiny thing she held an endless supply of nagging. ‘Be thankful I’m not leaving him on a hillside like the Spartans.’

I carried him between rank upon rank of the Gilden Guard, all bent over their meat and beer, voices lifted in half a dozen songs. By the main doors, open to vent the stink and heat of the road-ripe hundreds within, I caught sight of Gorgoth, unmistakeable, just outside at the edge of the torchlight. I went out, William clutched to my chest.

‘Gorgoth.’ A name that feels good in the mouth.

‘King Jorg.’ He turned his cat’s eyes on me, his great head turning slowly on a tree-trunk neck. He had a gravitas about him, did Gorgoth, something leonine.

‘Of all the people I know.’ I moved to stand beside him and followed his gaze out into the night. ‘Of all of them, since the Nuban died – it’s your friendship, your respect, I wanted. And you’re the one not to give it. I didn’t want it because you didn’t give it – but I do want it.’ Perhaps the beer spoke for me, but it spoke true.

‘You’re drunk,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be holding a baby.’

‘Answer the question.’

‘It wasn’t a question.’

‘Answer it anyway,’ I said.

‘We can never be friends, Jorg. You have crimes on your soul, blood on your hands, that only God can forgive.’ His voice rolled away from us, deeper and darker than the night.

‘I know it.’ I lifted William closer to my face and breathed him in. ‘You and I know it. The rest of them, they somehow forget, convince themselves it can be swept away, misremembered. Only you and Katherine see the truth. And Makin, though it’s Makin he can’t forgive, not me.’

I passed William to Gorgoth, pressing him forward until the leucrota lifted one massive three-fingered hand to receive him. He stood very still, eyes wider than wide, staring at my son, almost lost in the width of his palm.

‘Men shun me – I have never held a baby,’ he said. ‘They think what corrupted me will pass to their children if I touch them.’

‘And will it?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘Well then.’

We stood, watching the rise and fall of a tiny chest.

‘You’re right not to be a friend to me,’ I said. ‘But will you be a friend to William, as you once were to Gog?’ The boy would need friends. Better men than me.

The slowest nod of that great head. ‘You taught me that. Somehow you taught me what Gog was worth.’ He lifted William close to his face. ‘I will protect him, Jorg of Ancrath. As if he were my own.’

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