Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

‘Enough of this!’ Delirium had started to reel me in. I shook it off and focused. I moved on, snorting at the thought of William and the angel. Even at seven he could probably have given her a harder time of it than I did at fourteen.


At the far end of the hall an archway led into a smaller lower hall. It caught my eye since the Builders weren’t given to arches. A dozen or more cubicles opened to either side of the lesser hall, like monks’ cells, each of them layered in dust, scattered with plasteek fragments and pieces of corroded metal. I picked up a sliver of metal. Lighter than expected, not iron, and not rusted but powdery with some white residue. Oxidation. The word floated up from Lundist’s instructions on alchemy.

The seventh cell on the left held a wonder. A man waited there, without motion, his back to me. And from the side of his head a spray of scarlet blood, fragments of bone tumbling through the air … all frozen in the moment. A picture, but not a picture. Something real and solid but standing outside time. Where each of the other cells had a ring of corrosion in the centre of the ceiling, this one had a collar of silver metal, bound in places with copper, and surrounding a white light. The man sat in his grey tunic directly below the light. Somehow, no illumination escaped into the hall – and yet I saw the light. He sat on a chair that looked too thin to support him, odd in its slim and flowing form, without decoration or device. Beside him, part of a bed. Not a broken piece or a component but a section as if cut out like biscuits from dough, ending at some unseen perimeter that surrounded it and the man both. Beyond this small circle at the cell’s centre, holding the man, the chair, and part of the bed, the remainder of the room lay in dusty ruin like all the rest.

I walked in to touch the man – or the image – perhaps it was an image, like Fexler’s data ghost, just more convincingly drawn. Something the Builders considered art? Invisible glass stopped my fingers. I couldn’t get close to the man. My hand slid across an unseen surface, cool and slick to the fingertips.

The cell proved large enough for me to edge around the forbidden area, stepping through the dust at the margins of the room. The man’s hand came into view, holding a complex piece of metalwork to his head, an iron tube projecting from it to touch his temple.

‘I know this.’ The oldest of my father’s books held pictures of objects similar to this one. ‘It’s a gun.’

Another step and I saw the face, captured in the instant, imagining the pain but not yet feeling it despite the plume of blood and brain and bone behind him.

‘Fexler!’ I’d found the man himself. Not the memory.

The view-ring showed only the room, with Fexler lit red by the light, as if all the time that red dot pulsing amid the Iberico Hills had been this time-locked circle.

I made another circuit around the tableaux. ‘You stopped time!’ I thought about it, then shrugged. They say the Builders could fly. Who knows which is the more difficult, the stopping of time or taking to the skies? I thought of the watch buried in my baggage on Balky’s back. A device of the ancients – perhaps if I stopped its hands turning I would stop time just as they had.

‘You brought me here, Fexler.’ I spoke to the man. ‘What do you want? I can’t fix you.’

Obviously I couldn’t fix him. What had Fexler’s ghost been thinking? The answer came easy enough. Jorg breaks things. Fexler didn’t send me to fix this – he sent me to end it.

Of course breaking things that are sealed away behind unbreakable glass can prove difficult. As the point of my knife slid over the invisible barrier I started to doubt the glass existed at all. It seemed clear that something had to stand between a space where time flowed and a space where it did not. Zeno’s paradoxes sprung to mind. The Greeks loved paradoxes. Maybe they used them as currency. In any case I made no headway.

I walked away, a slight tremble in me from the fever. In every other cell nothing whole survived. I guess that the device in the ceiling had stopped time and in doing so had stopped the process of its own decay.