Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

‘Move the throne … there.’ He watched them take hold of it. ‘Be careful. Show respect.’


‘And the rug,’ Father Merrin said.

The Lord Commander raised his brows still further at that, but waved his men on. Two of them rolled back the heavy weave, a work of intricate patterns picked in silk, thick, and glistening with iridescence like a butterfly wing.

A copper plate, round, a hand span across, lay set into the floor at the point where the throne sat. I stepped forward to climb the dais. All about me the guards straightened, stiffened, ready to intervene.

‘Allow this, Hemmet,’ Father Merrin said without heat.

The Lord Commander drew a great breath and sighed it out. He waved me on with a dismissive gesture as Merrin had known he would. The future-sworn must be hell to live with.

I kept the view-ring hidden in my hand and knelt beside the metal plate. No handle or hinge, no keyhole. I recalled the door at the mathema tower and just held the ring against the copper, dead centre under my palm. A moment of warmth and a Builder-ghost sprang up above me. I snatched my hand back. Drawn in pale shades as all the others, this ghost seemed familiar. Not Fexler, or Michael, but …

‘Custodian!’ Lord Commander Hemmet fell to his knees. The guards around him followed his lead.

The Custodian stood wordless for a moment. He flickered, frowned, slid back a foot from the copper disk, maybe two. A faint buzz of vibration from the ring and there stood Fexler. The ghosts locked eyes, furrowed brows in concentration or fury, locked hands … and vanished.

‘Extraordinary!’ Lord Commander Hemmet pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. ‘What happened? There were two saints? Were they fight—’

All the lights came on. Every Builder light woke at the same moment so that the dome above our head sparkled like starry heavens. The light dazzled so that you had squint against it, and made the flames of the oil lamps invisible as if we stood outside in high summer.

‘The lights …’ said Norv the Raw, as if we might not have noticed.

Before any further statements of the obvious could be made doors of gleaming steel started to slide down from recesses above every entrance save the Gilden Gate. The action accompanied by a squealing noise that set my teeth on edge, the sound of nails down Lundist’s chalkboard.

‘The doors …’ said Norv. I resisted the temptation to beat him around the head.

It took maybe a count of ten for the doors to seal themselves, metal to stone, and without pause they began to retreat at the same rate. Guards came pouring through as the doors lifted, summoned by the squeal of the mechanism. For some minutes men of the guard rushed this way and that, set on diverse missions by the Lord Commander to establish that no attack was taking place, to see what other changes may have been wrought, to calm the servants, to set at ease the minds of other guard units, and the like.

All that frenzy came to a dead halt when they brought the Custodian in, the real man whose data-ghost we’d seen in the moment before Fexler wrestled him away again. He came in escorted by four men of the guard, with more crowding behind, discipline lost, curious children trailing a stranger in the market. Fexler had broken the Custodian’s stasis.

‘Well there’s a thing,’ I said. To Sindri’s party the Builder was a stranger in strange clothes carrying a stick crested with a mass of short red ribbons. They would have to be sharp to recognize him from the brief look at his ghost on the dais. To the guards, however, a legend walked among them. To Lord Commander Hemmet a saint approached, his revered ancestor and a part of the foundation of his authority. Hemmet raised a hand and the chatter died. ‘Welcome, Custodian! Welcome!’ A broad grin on his face.

The Custodian looked bewildered and perhaps fearful, but he had been asleep for a thousand years I supposed, so I allowed him that.

A pause, and then he spoke. But what language I couldn’t say. A harsh tongue, guttural, it seemed to sit on the edge of understanding. I caught one word that sounded like ‘alert’: he said it more than once.

‘Perhaps he speaks another language,’ I said. ‘I read that there were many tongues among the Builders, almost as many across the empire as there are kingdoms. And even if he speaks the empire tongue it may be that it has changed over the course of centuries. Things move on, nothing stands still, words least of all.’

Hemmet scowled at me but the anger didn’t last, a cloud across the sun. ‘You did this, you woke him up, brought the light back to the palace. And I won’t forget it, King Jorg.’ He set a hand to the Builder’s shoulder, then moved beside him, the arm around him, protective. ‘I will speak with the Custodian in private. Captain Kosson, afford our guests all possible courtesy and escort them from the palace when their needs have been met.’