Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

I shrugged. ‘Men are made of meat. Lichkin like to play with the pieces. I’ve seen worse in a fleshmonger’s shop. Hell, I’ve seen worse when men take against their captives.’ That last bit was a lie, but the truth was that it wasn’t conscience that stopped men short of the lichkins’ excesses – men just weren’t such accomplished butchers.

I watched Rike rather than Marten. Nothing natural put the fear into Rike. Some things might set him running, but he’d be angry as hell while he ran and planning his revenge all the way. The last time I’d seen him run in terror had been from the ghosts on the lichway. Fingers and eyeballs stashed away in peasant houses wouldn’t do it. I’d seen him take both, and he hadn’t much cared if the former owners had finished using them.

My gaze returned to the skin heap. Something in my imagination kept making it seem to crawl. ‘Burn that,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if it’s needed any more.’

I went to the inn. Time to step through that door.

‘Damnation! Jorg where the fuck have you been?’ Miana snarled that ‘Jorg’ past small white teeth. I always said she had a pretty face and a foul mouth. And they say even the most proper of maids can swear like a sailor when labouring over a child. What words would she find when it came to push and shove? Strange to say that we’re born to our mothers’ cursing but ever after they think the young have tender ears and can hear only what might be said in church. I closed the door behind me, leaving it just an inch or two ajar.

Inside the inn smelled of wood smoke, hot and close, and older less pleasant taints, perhaps of murders done here before the sun rose.

‘Sweet Jesus!’ Miana gasped and spat, clutching herself. She lay back in a great armchair heaped with cushions. Sweat beaded skin, tendons straining in her neck. ‘I don’t want my baby here. Not here.’ Katherine glanced at me across the swell of Miana’s breasts. On the walls brown smears where skinless bodies had touched rough timbers.

I hadn’t wanted my child born on the road. It’s a hard enough place to live, and not a fit place to enter the world, not even with a gilded carriage and an honour guard decorated just as richly. And this village of the dead bore even worse omens. I thought of Degran small, frail, broken in my hands. The lichkin held Gottering in its hands – waiting – and Miana was ready to deliver.

Gorgoth turned from the doorway of the inn, taking more wood for the pyre in the square. A thick log in each hand, lifted from those racked against the wall. Guardsmen had joined in, tearing shutters from windows, breaking up an abandoned cart. Others came from the inn’s cellar with flasks of brandy and urns of lamp oil to quicken the flames. I pulled the door open and followed Gorgoth.

‘Get back in here, you whore-born bastard!’

I closed the door on Miana, watched by the Gilden Guard to either side. Eyebrows raised.

‘The queen is not herself,’ I said.

Six golden-helmed heads snapped back front and centre as I passed between them.

The lichkin held the town, held us all, though many of our number didn’t yet know it. Perhaps a little fire might loosen its grip and cleanse the air. Gottering was a spell now, an enchantment, a single great rune set out in pieces of men. Blood-magic.

When the timbers lay doused and heaped around the pile of flayed skins I drew Gog from his scabbard. The blade gleamed in the winter sun so’s you could imagine flames dancing on its edge. I set it to the wood. ‘Burn,’ I said. And flames really did dance on that keen line.

The blaze took fast, leaping amongst the broken wood, devouring the oil and spirits, sinking hot teeth into timber. Almost at once the meaty tang of burned flesh reached out, stronger than the smoke. Memory took me to the Haunt, walking out between scorched corpses to meet Egan of Arrow. And just a moment later, another memory, the shrieks of those the fire had left alive. Only – not memory.

‘What?’ I tilted my head to locate the sound. A high keening.

Captain Harran broke into the square on horseback. ‘It’s from that copse, on the ridge to the west. Hollow Wood.’

As we came into Gottering there had been another island in the flooded fields, three hundred yards to the west, a few acres of tangled woodland.

The lichkins’ mercy, Gomst had said, is that in the end they let you die.

But not yet.

The people of Gottering still lived. They still felt it. Somewhere in that wood close on two hundred townsfolk, flayed, without fingers or eyes or teeth, howled as I burned their skins.

‘Jorg!’ A shout edged with scream. Katherine at the doorway, pale, framed by auburn curls.

I ran, sword in hand. I pushed past her.

‘It— It got stronger. I couldn’t stop it,’ Katherine said behind me.