Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

They passed several doors on the left, and shuttered windows on the right. A storm-wind rattled the heavy boards but the rain had yet to fall. Two guards waited at the corner, dead men in rusted armour, a faint aroma of decay about them overwritten by the eye-watering chemicals used to cure their flesh.

‘These are strong ones. I can feel it.’ Kai paused, lifting his hand toward the pair as if pressing against something in the air.

‘Not much of these passed on,’ Chella said. ‘Bad men. Bad lives. It left a lot to be called back into the body. Cunning, some measure of intelligence, some useful memories. Most of the guards here are like this. And when you find a corpse you can refill almost to the brim, well you don’t want it to rot away on you now, do you?’ The dead men watched her with shrivelled eyes, their dark thoughts unknowable.

More corridors, more guards, more doors. The Dead King took the castle only months before from the last Brettan lord of any consequence, Artur Elgin, whose ships had sailed from the port below for twenty years and more, terrorizing the continental coasts north and south. Artur Elgin’s days of terror weren’t over. Indeed they had very much begun, though now he served the Dead King, or rather what had been called back from the deadlands did, and Chella suspected that was pretty much all of the man.

Chella sensed the Dead King always, from a thousand miles she felt him as something crawling beneath her skin. In the castle where he laid his plans no place was free of the taste of him, bitter on the tongue.

At last they came to the doors to Artur’s court, slabs of old oak with black iron hinges scrolling out across them. The bog-stink wrinkled her nose. Mire-ghouls watched them from the shadows to either side, some with black darts clutched in stained hands. Before the doors two giants, each more than eight foot tall, freaks from the promised lands, their dena scorched by the Builders’ fire so that they grew wrong. Big but wrong. And now dead. Meat-puppets held by the necromancers’ will.

The giants stepped aside and Chella moved toward the doors. The presence of the Dead King overwhelmed that of his court, reaching through stone and wood to swamp her senses. In the fullness of Chella’s necromantic power, when she stepped as far from life as a person can and still return, she knew the Death King’s presence as a dark-light, a black sun whose radiance froze and corrupted but somehow still drew her on. Now though, dressed only in the tatters of her former strength, with her blood pumping once again, Chella felt her master as a threat, as something sculpted from every memory of hurt or harm or pain, screaming hatred in a register just beyond hearing.

She set her hands to the doors and found them trembling.

The stink of lichkin hits flesh like ink hits blotting paper: it sinks bone-deep, overriding irrelevances such as the nose. Men are busy dying from the moment they’re born but it’s a crawl from the cradle to the grave. Being near a lichkin makes it a race.

The Dead King’s court lay in darkness but as Chella pushed the doors open a cold glow began to spread within the chamber. Ghosts, tight-wrapped around their masters, began to unfurl, like an outer skin, flayed from the lichkin by the presence of life. The spirits burned with the light of their own misery, pale apparitions, delicate tissues of memory, membranes of misused lives. The lichkin themselves were blind spots on her living eyes, as if patches of her retina had died, folding the room’s image over itself in those places. In times when the necromancy ran deep in her and her blood lay still, Chella had seen the lichkin, bone-white, bone-thin, the wedge of their eyeless heads filled with small sharp teeth, each hand dividing into three root-like fingers.

‘Kai!’ She felt his retreat. The sound of his name made him stop. He knew better than to run.

The Dead King sat on Lord Artur Elgin’s driftwood throne. He wore Artur Elgin’s robes. They fitted him well. Blue-leather shoulders, a laced front fixed with silver clasps each set with sea-stone, the leather giving over to thick velvet of a deeper midnight blue. He wore Artur Elgin’s body too, and it fitted him less well, hunched and awkward, and when he lifted his head to Chella the smile that he made with the dead man’s mouth was an awful thing.





19


Five years earlier

Two knives broke in the effort to uncoil the scorpion. When I locked its tail in place with Old Mary’s clamps and levered it apart using a sword, the corpse opened in a series of jerking releases, accompanied by crunches like glass breaking under a heel.

‘You’re something made,’ I told it. ‘A clever piece of clockwork.’

I could see no cogs or wheels though, no matter how close I squinted. Just black crystal, traces of clear sparkling jelly and multitudes of wires, most of them so thin as to be on the edge of invisible.

‘Something broken.’ I put it into Lesha’s saddle-pack to take with me.