Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

‘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 deadlands 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.