Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

Lawrence, Mark




Dedicated to my son, Bryn.


The Story So Far


For those of you who have had to wait a year for this book I provide a brief synopsis of books 1 and 2, so that your memories may be refreshed. Here I carry forward only what is of importance to the tale that follows.





Jorg’s mother and brother, William, were killed when he was nine: he hung hidden in the thorns and witnessed it. His uncle sent the assassins.

Jorg’s father, Olidan, is not a nice man. He killed Jorg’s dog when Jorg was six, and stabbed Jorg in the chest when he was fourteen.

Jorg’s father still rules in Ancrath, married now to Sareth. Sareth’s sister Katherine is Jorg’s step-aunt and something of an obsession for him.

Jorg accidentally (though not guiltlessly) killed his baby step-brother Degran.

A man named Luntar put Jorg’s memory of the incident in a box. Jorg has now recovered the memory.

A number of magically-gifted individuals work behind the many thrones of the Broken Empire, competing with each other and manipulating events to further their own control.

We left Jorg still on his uncle’s throne in Renar. The princes of Arrow lay dead, their army shattered and the six nations gathered under Orrin of Arrow’s rule ripe for the picking.

We left Jorg the day after his wedding to twelve-year-old Queen Miana.

Jorg had sent men to recover his badly-wounded chancellor, Coddin, from the mountainside.

Katherine’s diary was found in the destruction outside the Haunt – whether she survived where her baggage train did not is unknown.

Red Kent was badly burned in the fight.

Jorg discovered there are ghosts of the Builders in the network of machines they left behind.

Jorg learned from one such ghost, Fexler Brews, that what he calls magic exists because the Builder scientists changed the way the world works. They made it possible for a person’s will to affect matter and energy directly.

The gun Jorg used to conclude the siege on the Haunt was taken from Fexler Brews’ suicide.

The powers over necromancy and fire were burned out of Jorg when they nearly destroyed him at the finale of the battle for the Haunt.

The Dead King is a powerful individual who watches the living from the deadlands and has shown a particular interest in Jorg.

Chella, a necromancer, has become an agent of the Dead King.

Every four years the rulers of the hundred fragments of empire convene in the capital Vyene for Congression – a truce period during which they vote for a new emperor. In the hundred years since the death of the last steward no candidate has managed to secure the necessary majority.

In the earlier thread ‘Four Years Earlier’ we left Jorg at his grandfather’s castle on the Horse Coast. The mathmagician, Qalasadi, had escaped after failing to poison the nobles. The Builder-ghost, Fexler, had given Jorg the view-ring that offers interactive views of the world from satellites and other optical resources.





Prologue


Kai stood before the old-stone, a single rough block set upright in the days when men knew nothing but wood and rock and hunting. Or perhaps they knew more than that, for they had set the old-stone in a place of seeing. A point where veils thinned and lifted and secrets might be learned or told. A place where the heavens stood a little lower, such that the sky-sworn might touch them more easily.

The local men called the promontory ‘the Finger’, which Kai supposed was apt if dull. And if it were a finger then the old-stone stood on the knuckle. Here the finger lay sixty yards across and at the edges fell a similar distance to meet the marsh in a series of steep and rocky steps.

Kai took a deep breath and let the cold air fill his lungs, let the dampness infect him, slowed his heart, and listened for the high, sad voice of the old-stone, less of a sound than a memory of sound. His vision lifted from him with just a whisper of pain. The point of Kai’s perception vaulted skyward, leaving his flesh beside the monolith. He watched now from a bright valley between two tumbling banks of cloud, watched himself as a dot upon the Finger, and the promontory itself a mere sliver of land reaching out into the vastness of the Reed Sea. At this distance the River Rill became a ribbon of silver running to the Lake of Glass.

Kai flew higher. The ground fell away, growing more abstract with each beat of his mind-born wings. The mists swirled, and the clouds held him again in their cool embrace.

Is this what death is like? A cold whiteness, for ever and ever amen?