Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

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.